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LORD CHATHAM 

HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 



LORD CHATHAM 

HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 



BY 

LORD ROSEBERY 




HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS 

NEW YORK AND LONDON 

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Copyright, 1910, by Harper & Brothers 

Published November, 1910 
Printed in the United States of America 



©CLA27 57< 




TO 

BEVILL FORTESCUE 

OF DROPMORE AND BOCONNOC 

THIS BOOK, WHICH OWES EVERYTHING TO HIM, 

IS 

GRATEFULLY DEDICATED 



PREFACE 

My first words of preface must be of excuse for some 
apparent lack of gratitude in my dedication. For besides 
my debt to Mr. Fortescue, I owe my warmest acknowl- 
edgments to Mary, Lady Ilchester, and her son, for the per- 
mission to examine some of the papers of Henry Fox; a 
character of great interest, whose life is yet to be written. 
But I hope that this will soon be presented by Lord Il- 
chester, whose capacity for such work is already proved. 
I render my sincere thanks both to him and to his mother; 
but my dedication, written long before I had access to 
the Holland House papers, must remain unchanged; for 
without Mr. Fortescue's family collection of papers at 
Dropmore this book could never have been begun. 

The life of Chatham is extremely difficult to write, and, 
strictly speaking, never can be written at all. It is diffi- 
cult because of the artificial atmosphere in which he thought 
it well to envelop himself, and because the rare glimpses 
which are obtainable of the real man reveal a nature so 
complex, so violent, and so repressed. What is this strange 
career ? 

Born of a turbulent stock, he is crippled by gout at 
Eton and Oxford, then launched into a cavalry regiment, 
and then into Parliament. For eight years he is groom- 
in-waiting to a prince. Then he holds subordinate office 
for nine years more. Then he suddenly flashes out, not 
as a royal attendant or a minor placeman, but as the 

vii 



PREFACE 

people's darling and the champion of the country. In 
obscure positions he has become the first man in Britain, 
which he now rules absolutely for four years in a contin- 
ual blaze of triumph. Then he is sacrificed to an intrigue, 
but remains the supreme statesman of his country for five 
years more. Then he becomes Prime Minister amid gen- 
eral acclamation; but in an instant he shatters his own 
power, and retires, distempered if not mad, into a cell. 
At last he divests himself of office, and recovers his reason ; 
he lives for nine years more, a lonely, sublime figure, but 
awful to the last, an incalculable force. He dies, practically, 
in public, as he would have wished, and the nation, hoping 
against hope, pins its faith in him to the hour of death. 

And for most of the time his associations are ignoble, 
if not humiliating. He had to herd with political jobbers; 
he has to serve intriguing kinsfolk; he had to cringe to 
unworthy Kings and the mistresses of Kings; he is flouted 
and insulted by a puppet whig like Rockingham. Despite 
all this| he bequeaths the most illustrious name in our 
political history; and it is the arduous task of his biog- 
rapher to show how these circumstances led to this result. 

Happily this task does not fall to the present writer, 
who has only to describe the struggle and the ascent; 
the consummation and glory of the career lie beyond these 

limits. 

Further, it may be said that not merely is the complete 
life of Chatham difficult to write, but impossible. It is safe, 
indeed, to assert that it never has been written and never 
can be written. 

This seems a hard saying, for it appears to be a reflec- 
tion on his numerous biographers from Thackeray to Von 
Ruville, though it is nothing of the sort. The fact is that 
the materials do not exist. For the first time the Drop- 
more papers throw some light on the earlier part of his 

viii 



PREFACE 

life. But it is tolerably certain that nothing of this kind 
exists to illuminate his later years. Of his conversations, 
of his private life nothing, or little more than nothing, 
remains. Except on the one genial occasion on which 
Burke saw him tooling a jim-whiskey down to Stowe, we 
scarcely see a human touch. After his accession to office 
in 1756, his letters of pompous and sometimes abject cir- 
cumlocution, intended partly to deceive his correspondent 
and partly to baffle the authorities of the Post Office, give 
no clue to his mind. He wrote an ordinary note as Rogers 
wrote an ordinary couplet. Even his love-letters are in- 
curably stilted. There is no ease, no frankness, no self- 
revelation in anything that he wrote after he embarked 
actively in politics. From that time he shrouded him- 
self carefully and successfully from his contemporaries, ex- 
cept on the occasions when he appeared in public; for, 
strange to say, it was in his speeches that his nature some- 
times burst forth. And yet even here, there is trouble. 
One of the difficulties of a life of Chatham lies in the rough 
notes of his speeches preserved by Horace Walpole. They 
are often confused, often dreary, sometimes incomprehen- 
sible; but they must be included, for there is nothing else; 
though they weigh heavy on a book. Sometimes, however, 
they reveal a flash of the man, and Pitt permits little else. 
Such being his deliberate scheme of life, adopted partly 
from policy, partly from considerations of health, there 
seems little more material for a biography of the man, 
apart from his public career, than exists in the case of a 
Trappist. 

It is then, I think, safe to predict that the real life of 
Chatham can never be written, as the intimate facts are 
wanting. What survive were, as usual, exhausted by 
Macaulay in those two brilliant essays, in which with the 
sure grasp of historical imagination he depicted the glow- 

ix 



PREFACE 

ing scenes of Chatham's career, and left to posterity the 
portrait which will never be superseded. For his instinct 
supplies the lack of evidence, and though there may be 
exaggeration of praise, that praise will not be seriously 
diminished. Lives of Chatham will always be written, 
because few subjects are more interesting or more dramatic, 
but they must always be imperfect. It is, of course, easy 
to record his course as a statesman, his speeches, his 
triumphs, his achievements; and these narratives will be 
called biographies. But will they ever reveal the real 
man? 

There seems to be a constant tendency in writers to 
forget that the provinces of history and biography, though 
they often overlap, are essentially distinct; for history 
records the life of nations, and biography the life of in- 
dividuals. To set forth the annals of the time in which 
the hero has existed, and to note his contact with them, 
is only a part of his life, though it is often held to be all 
that is worth remembering. The life of any man that 
ever lived on earth is far more than his public career. 
The life of a man is not his public life, which is always 
alloyed with some necessary diplomacy and which is some- 
times only a mask; it is made up of a thousand touches, 
a multitude of lights and shadows, most of which are in- 
visible behind the austere presentment of statescraft. 
We have probably all, and perhaps more than all, that 
Shakespeare ever wrote; we have so to speak all his public 
life. But would we not gladly give one or two of his plays 
to obtain some true insight into his private life, to realise 
the humanity of this superhuman being, to know how this 
immortal was linked to mortality? We want to know 
how a master man talked, and, if possible, what he thought; 
what was his standpoint with regard to the grave issues of 
life; what he was in his hours of ease, what he enjoyed, 



PREFACE 

how he unbent; in a word, what he was without his wig 
and bag and sword, in his dressing-gown and slippers, with 
a friend, a novel, or a pipe. This is half or three parts of 
a man, and it is certain that we shall never know this 
aspect of Chatham. He would no doubt, had it served his 
purpose, have appeared in the dressing-gown and slippers, 
but the array would have been as solemn and artificial as 
the robes of a cardinal. He would, had it served his pur- 
pose, have smoked a pipe, but it would have been the 
jewelled nargileh of the Grand Mogul. He had practically 
no intimates; his wife told nothing, his children told noth- 
ing; he revealed himself neither by word nor on paper, he 
deliberately enveloped himself in an opaque fog of mystery ; 
and there seems no clue or channel by which any further 
detail of his character can reach us, unless Addington, the 
doctor, or Wilson, the tutor, have anything to tell us. 
But did anything of the kind survive, we feel confident 
that it would have transpired. Beckford and Potter, 
Barre and Camden, his friends or sycophants or satellites, 
have left no sign. Shelburne indeed thinks that he pene- 
trated Chatham, and Shelburne no doubt saw him under 
circumstances of comparative intimacy. And yet, judg- 
ing by the result, it may well be doubted whether Shelburne 
did more than watch and guess, with an inkling of spite. 
Occasionally there is a legend, a tradition, or an anecdote, 
but Chatham seems to have cut off all vestiges of his real 
self as completely as a successful fugitive from justice. 
And so posterity sees nothing but the stern effigy represent- 
ing what he wished, or permitted, or authorised to be seen. 
This is not enough or nearly enough, but it must now be 
certain that there will never be much more. This makes 
us all the more grateful for the Dropmore papers and for 
Mr. Fortescue's liberality. He has been able to throw new 
light on Chatham's youth and on his unrestrained days. 

xi 



PREFACE 

Light on the subsequent years of self-repression would be 
so guarded and shaded that we should scarce obtain a 
glimpse of the true man. Indeed, by his careful disguise 
Chatham has made himself a prehistoric or rather a pre- 
biographical figure, a man of the fifteenth century or 
earlier. We know what was around him, the scene on 
which he played, the other actors in the great drama, and 
we recognise himself on the stage; but away from the 
footlights he remains in darkness. In a word, after 1756, 
when this book ends, his public life is conspicuous and 
familiar. But his inner life after that period will never 
be known; and so we must be content with a torso. 

It has seemed unnecessary to give references to familiar printed 
authorities, such as Horace Walpole, Coxe, Harris's Life of Hardwicke, 
Waldegrave, or the published Dropmore MSS. But where an exception 
has been deemed necessary, ' Orford ' refers to the 'Memoirs,' and 
' Walpole ' denotes an allusion to the ' Letters.' 

Lord Camelford's manuscript, which I have used so copiously, is an 
intimate family document entitled ' Family Characters and Anecdotes,' 
addressed to his son, and dated 1781. 



LORD CHATHAM 

HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 



CHAPTER I 

THERE is one initial part of a biography which is 
skipped by every judicious reader; that in which the 
pedigree of the hero is set forth, often with warm fancy, 
and sometimes at intolerable length. It is, happily, not 
necessary to enter upon the bewildering branches of the 
innumerable Pitts, but only to keep to one conspicuous 
stem. We must however record that the Pitt family was 
gentle and honourable; 'it had,' says one of them, 'been 
near two centuries growing into wealth without producing 
anything illustrious.' 1 But in the eighteenth century it 
was destined to blossom into no less than four peerages, 
Londonderry, Rivers, Camelford, and Chatham, not one 
of which survives. William Pitt's great-grandfather was 
Vicar of Blandford in Dorsetshire; and there was born 
Thomas, his grandfather, better known as Governor Pitt, 
and associated in history with the famous Pitt diamond. 
The Vicar, being the younger son of a younger son, had no 
fortune but the advowson of his own living of St. Mary; 
and Thomas again being a younger son set forth to seek 
his fortunes in the Golden East, and, it may be added, 
found them there. 

1 Camelford. 



LORD CHATHAM 

Of this redoubtable progenitor, Governor Pitt, as he 
was always called, it would be possible to say much, as his 
life, measured by the length of current biographies, would 
justify a volume; in any case it is necessary to say some- 
thing, for in his character may be traced some germs of 
his grandson's intractable qualities. 

We first catch sight of him as an 'interloper,' that is, 
an illicit merchant carrying on trade in violation of the 
East India Company's monopoly. In that capacity he 
showed himself formidable and intrepid, 'of a haughty, 
huflying, daring temper,' * and the Company waged un- 
sparing war against him. In a letter to their agents, 
writing with special reference to him, they say: 'We have 
a most acceptable accompt of the nourishing condition of 
all our affaires in those parts, and of the wreck and dis- 
appointment of all the interlopers; insomuch that if you 
have done your parts in reference to the Crowne, that Tho. 
Pitts went upon, there is no probability (that) of seven 
interloping ships that went to India the same year that 
our Agent did, any one ship will ever come to England 
again; and . . . wee cannot doubt that you will in due 
time render us as pleasing an accompt of those interlopers 
that went out this year, which will certainly put an end 
to that kind of robbery.' 2 And so these hostilities con- 
tinued for more than a score of years, but without the 
suppression of Pitt, who appears to have greatly thriven 
in the process; for during the latter part of this period he 
was member of Parliament for his own pocket borough of 
Old Sarum, 3 bought out of these contraband gains. Vic- 
tory, indeed, rested with him; for the Company, weary 
and baffled, determined, on the faith of an ancient but 
precarious principle, to set a thief to catch a thief, and in 

1 Diary of William Hedges, III. x. 2 Hedges, III. xii. 

3 He purchased it from Lord Salisbury about 1690. Hedges, III. xxx. 

2 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

November, 1697, appointed Pitt governor of Fort St. 
George, though some fastidious stockholders protested. 
This 'roughling immoral man,' as one of the objectors 
called him, governed with a high and strong hand from 
1698 to 1709; when the Company, finding the burden of 
him intolerable, summarily dismissed him. He was, no 
doubt, like his grandson, a difficult servant; and in his 
career we see the source of that energy, haughtiness, and 
self-reliance which were so conspicuous in both. Lord 
Camelford, his great-grandson, though a relentless critic 
of his family, gives, in the grateful character of an heir, a 
leniently appreciative account of the Governor; and says 
that ' he amassed a fortune which was reckoned prodigious 
in those times without the smallest stain on his reputation. 
I have heard (but at what exact period of his life I know 
not) that, having accomplished such a sum as he thought 
would enable him to pass the remainder of his days in 
peace, he was taken prisoner, together with the greatest 
part of his effects, on his return to England, and released 
at the intercession of the Duchess of Portsmouth, who 
was then in France. He went back to India and made in 
a shorter time a much larger fortune from the credit he 
had established and the experience he had acquired.' 

However that may be, he now returned promptly to 1710 
England, by way of Bergen, having shipped on a Danish 
vessel, and having sent before him in the heel of his son's 
shoe x the precious chattel which made his name famous, 
until, under his descendants, it acquired a different lustre. 
This was a prodigious diamond, to which he alludes in his 
correspondence as his 'grand concern,' which he bought 
for 48,000/., and sold, after keeping it for some sixteen 
years, to the Regent of Orleans for the French Crown. It 

1 The portrait of the Governor at Boconnoc represents him with the dia- 
mond in his hat. That at Chevening with the diamond in his own shoe. 



LORD CHATHAM 

was rather a sonorous than a profitable bargain, for though 
he sold it for 133,000/., he was never paid in full. He 
received 40,000/. and three boxes of jewels, but the balance, 
calculated at 20,000/., was never discharged. He and his 
descendants reckoned, indeed, that on the whole he was 
the poorer by the possession of this gem. A tradition 
remains that the bargain might have fallen through at the 
last moment but for the shrewdness of the Governor's 
second son, Lord Londonderry. When Rondet, the royal 
jeweller, came from Paris to receive it, he criticised the 
water of the stone. 'His lordship, who was quick enough 
in business, understood him, and putting a bank-note 
into his hands, bid him go to the window to see it in a 
better light. It was then decided to be in all respects 
perfect.' 1 

It is evident, however, that he was possessed of con- 
siderable though exaggerated wealth, and he was probably 
the first of those nabobs who were to bulk so largely in 
the drama, the society, and the politics of the eighteenth 
century. Among these his diamond gave him pre-eminence, 
and made his name both famous and proverbial. In Eng- 
land he remained for the rest of his life, some sixteen 
years, dying in 1726. The reformed filibuster had become 
a power in the land. He had wealth, force of character, 
political connection, and parliamentary influence. This 
last must have been an object with him, as we find him 
sitting for Thirsk instead of his own borough of Old Sarum ; 
and his eldest grandson seems to have inherited a con- 
siderable but indefinable interest in the boroughmongering 
of the West, having definite powers in regard to Okehamp- 
ton and Sarum, and vaguer connections elsewhere. So 
the Governor, a staunch Whig and furious anti-Jacobite, 
with an influential son-in-law in Stanhope, a soldier and 

1 Camelford. 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

statesman who was First Minister for a time, was a man 
to be reckoned with. He was indeed offered, and had 
accepted, the Governorship of Jamaica, a high compliment, 
for it was then a position of peculiar difficulty, but never 
took up the appointment; finding probably his hands full 
at home, with an insubordinate family to manage, capital 
to invest, and estates to superintend. 

We find him living at Twickenham, Swallowfield, 
Blandford, and in Pall Mall, but mainly at Stratford near 
Old Sarum. He had indeed contemplated building his 
principal residence at Blandford, his early home. But the 
younger children, finding that this would be settled on 
the eldest son, intercepted his purpose and turned his 
attention to Swallowfield, 'where, however, he contrived 
to throw away as much money in a very ugly place with 
no property about it,' 1 writes his resentful heir. 

Finally, in 1726, the Governor was gathered to his 
fathers, and his spoils caused some disappointment. His 
wealth had been over-rated, as is perhaps the case with 
all notorious fortunes, and not well invested; at any rate, 
he had burned his fingers in the South Sea Bubble. He 
seems to have left 100,000/. in personal property, though 
some of that may have consisted in unsubstantial and un- 
realised advances to Lord Londonderry, or others of his 
children. He had bought land wherever he could find it 
(for the sake, perhaps, of influence as much as income), in 
London (Soho), Berkshire, Hampshire, Wiltshire, Dorset- 
shire, Devonshire, and Cornwall, as well as that most 
marketable of assets, Old Sarum, and apparently other 
borough interests. But his greatest acquisition was the 
noble estate of Boconnoc, which he purchased in 171 7 
from the widow of that wild Mohun who was slain 
in duel by his brother-in-law, the Duke of Hamil- 

1 Camelford. 
2 5 



LORD CHATHAM 

ton. The Governor paid 53,000/. for the estate, a great 
price in those days; but was held to have got a bar- 
gain. 1 

To his family he had always been formidable, but also 
an object of jealous rapacity and expectation. They 
wrangled and intrigued for his money both during his life 
and afterwards, and seem to have been universally dis- 
satisfied by the result. 'From the various characters of 
these persons ' (the Governor's children) ' it is easy to con- 
ceive,' writes Lord Camelford, 'in what manner the Gov- 
ernor must have been pulled to pieces by their different 
passions and interests when he came to realise his wealth 
in England.' The transactions with Lord Londonderry 
seem to have been particularly complicated; in fact they 
were never unravelled. We only gather, as a specimen of 
them, that after the Governor's death his executors claimed 
95,000/. as due from Lord Londonderry; which Lord Lon- 
donderry denied, , claiming 10,000/. from the estate. Thirty 
years were vainly spent in the endeavour to clear up this 
issue, a process rendered all the more arduous by Lord 
Londonderry's having peremptorily possessed himself of 
his father's papers after death. Only one case seems to 
have been free from complication. The Governor stated 
succinctly that his son John was good for nothing, and 
so he logically left him nothing. John, however, claimed 
an annuity which, we may be confident, he never ob- 
tained. Thus there were endless disputes, a civil war 
in the family, not uncongenial, perhaps, to those who 
waged it; which died out only with the combatants, but 
which illustrates once more the volcanic character of these 
truculent Pitts. 

It is in his family relations, in his dealings with these 
ungracious heirs and with his own wife, that the Governor 

1 Lyte's Dunster, 494. 
6 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

is most vivid and interesting; at any rate, to one who 
has to trace the heredity of genius and character in his 
descendants. Thomas Pitt's blood came all aflame from 
the East, and flowed like burning lava to his remotest 
descendants, with the exception of Chatham's children; 
but even then it blazed up again in Hester Stanhope. 
There was in it, even when it throbbed in the veins of his 
eldest son and grandson, some tropical, irritant quality 
which, under happy circumstances and control, might pro- 
duce genius, but which under ordinary circumstances 
could only evolve domestic skirmish and friction. The 
Governor himself, in his dealings with his wife and chil- 
dren, does not seem to have been tolerant or tolerable. 
He set himself to rule them with the notions of absolutism 
which are associated with the Oriental monarchies, but 
he met with no great measure of success. It is necessary 
to study his methods as exhibiting the volcanic source of 
a formidable race. 

His wife was of the family of Innes in Morayshire, ' of 
Scotch and Cornish extraction,' says Lord Camelford, and 
she was lineally descended from the Regent Murray. Sir 
John Sinclair, like a loyal Scot, attributes the genius and 
eloquence of the Pitts to their ' fortunate connection . . . 
with a Miss Innes of Redhall, in the Highlands of Scot- 
land.' Of her, nevertheless, in unconsciousness of this 
obligation, but in receipt of private advices, the Governor 
writes in terms of implacable hostility. He had heard, he 
says to his son, ' that your mother has been guilty of some 
imprudence at the Bath .... let it be what it will, in my 
esteem she is noe longer my wife, nor will I see her more 
if I can help it.' * 

But his children were not to be released from duty to 

1 This and the following extracts from the Governor's correspondence are 
all taken from the Dropmore Papers (Hist. MSS.). 

7 



LORD CHATHAM 

her by her supposed misconduct. Four years earlier he 
had written to Robert : ' If what you write of your mother 
be true, I think she is mad, and wish she was well secured 
in Bedlam; but I charge you let nothing she says or does 
make you undutiful in any respect whatever.' So when 
they apparently act on the Governor's view of Mrs. Pitt, he 
turns round and belabours them. 'Have all of you,' he 
inquires of his eldest son, 'shook hands with shame, that 
you regard not any of the tyes of Christianity, humanity, 
consanguinity, duty, good morality, or anything that makes 
you differ from beasts, but must run from one end of the 
kingdome to the other, aspersing one another, and aiming 
at the ruine and destruction of one another?' This genial 
picture of his offspring does not seem wholly imaginary, 
for the Governor proceeds: 'That you should dare to doe 
such an unnatural and opprobrious action as to turne your 
mother and sisters out of doors? — for which I observe 
your frivolous reasons, and was astonished to read them; 
and I no less resint what they did to your child at Strat- 
ford. But I see your hand is against every one of them, 
and every one against you, and your brother William to 
his last dying minute.' (William had died young, in 1706.) 
A week later he writes again: 'Not only your letters, but 
all I have from friends, are stuffed with an account of the 
hellish confusion that is in my family; and by what I can 
collect of all my letters, the vileness of your actions on 
all sides are not to be paralleled in history. Did ever 
mother, brother, and sisters study one another's ruine and 
destruction more than my unfortunate and cursed family 
have done?' He again reverts to the grievance of Robert's 
having turned his mother and sisters out of doors, though 
he calls them, in the same letter, 'an infamous wife and 
children,' and states that he has 'discarded and renounced 
your mother for ever'; apparently on suspicion, for he 

8 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

makes 'noe distinction between women that are reputed 
ill and such as are actually soe.' The wife of the Caesar 
of Fort St. George had to be above suspicion. Nor is 
this by any means an isolated passage. From his Eastern 
satrapy the Governor pours on his hapless family, and 
especially on his first born, a constant flood of scorn and 
invective. The arrival of the Indian mail must have 
caused a periodical panic to his children, and his announce- 
ment in 1 715 that 'writing now is not so much my talent 
as formerly' a corresponding relief. 

In vain does Robert, the eldest son, inspire friends to 
write to the Governor glowing accounts of his conduct; 
the Governor sniffs suspicion in every breeze. 'I wish 
gaming bee not rife in your family, or you could never 
have spent so considerable an estate in so short a time.' 
1 1 wish gameing, drinking, and other debaucheries has not 
been the bane of you.' 'I wish these sore eyes of yours 
did not come by drinking, and that generally ushers in 
gaming, of either of which vices or any other dishonour- 
able action, if I find you guilty, you may be assured I 
will give you no quarter.' 'I think that no son in the 
world deserves more to be discarded by a father.' But 
on the rare occasions when the Governor does not write 
in a passion his letters are full of sound sense. The cost 
of education is the only expense which he does not grudge. 
1 1 would also have you putt your mother in mind that she 
gives her daughters good education, and not to stick at 
any charge for it.' But he wishes to get his money's worth. 
'See that your brothers and sisters keep close to their 
studies, and let not my money be spent in vain on them; 
if it be, I'll pinch 'em hereafter.' Again, later, he writes: 
'When this reaches you your brothers will be 17 years 
old. If their genius leads them to be scholars, I would 
have them sent to Oxford, but placed in two distinct col- 

9 



LORD CHATHAM 

leges; and if inclined to study law you may enter them 
in the Temple. But if they are inclined to be merchants, 
let them learn all languages, and obtain perfect knowledge 
of the sciences bearing upon trade. I believe that trade 
will flourish rather than decay.' 

When he returned home things were probably not much 
better for his children, though his letters, of course, are 
less frequent, and also less violent. But we gather from 
timid and vigilant bulletins sent off by those who cau- 
tiously approached the Governor's lair that he was still 
as formidable and plain spoken as ever. He suspects 
Robert of Jacobitism, the supreme sin in the judgment of 
the old Governor. ' It is said you are taken up with 
factious caballs, and are contriving amongst you to put 
a French kickshaw upon the throne again.' ' I have heard 
since I came to towne,' he writes seven years afterwards, 
'that you are strooke with your old hellish acquaintance, 
and in all your discourse are speaking in favour of that 
villainous traytor Ormond.' And again: 'Since last post 
I have had it reiterated to me that in all company you are 
vindicating Ormonde and Bullingbrooke, the two vilest 
rebells that ever were in any nation, and that you still 
adhere to your cursed Tory principles, and keep those 
wretches company who hoped by this time to have mur- 
thered the whole Royall family: in which catastrophe 
your father was sure to fall,' &c. &c. From which it may 
be gathered that the moral temperature of Pall Mall, 
whence the Governor was writing, differed little from that 
of Madras. 

The only note of tenderness that he ever strikes is with 
regard to his grandson, William, to whom he looks with 
a rare prescience of attention. At first he conducts both 
boys from Eton to Swallowfield, 'with some of their com- 
rogues,' on a short leave of absence. But soon it is William 

io 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

alone whom he takes as a companion. ' I set out for 
Swallowfield Friday next; your son, William, goes with 
me.' 'I observe you have sent for your son, William, 
from Eton. He is a hopeful lad, and doubt not but he 
will answer yours and all his friends' expectations.' 'I 
shall be glad to see Will here as he goes to Eton.' 'Mon- 
day last I left Will at Eton.' Sentences like these taken 
from the Governor's letters are, when the writer is con- 
sidered, a sufficient testimony of exceptional regard. It 
is not too much to say that William is the only one of his 
descendants whom the Governor commends ; the only one, 
indeed, who never falls under the lash of the Governor's 
uncontrollable tongue. 

The Governor left behind him three sons, Robert, 
Thomas, and John; and two daughters, Lucy and Essex. 
Robert, the eldest son, married, somewhat clandestinely, 
Harriot Villiers, sister of the Earl of Grandison, 'who 
seems to have brought with her,' says her grandson, 'little 
more than the insolence of a noble alliance.' A more 
favourable estimate declares that she had a fortune of 
3000/., and that 'it is a great dispute among those who 
have the pleasure of conversing with her whether her 
beauty, understanding, or good-humor be the most cap- 
tivating.' She makes a pale apparition in Lady Suffolk's 
correspondence, soliciting a place for her brother, Lord 
Grandison, with the offer of a bribe, and subsiding under 
the royal confidant's rebuke. 1 

The second, Thomas, married one of the heiresses of 
Ridgeway, Earl of Londonderry. After that nobleman's 
death 'he bought the honours which were extinct in the 
person of his wife's father.' 2 One infers from casual hints 
that Thomas may have had the most influence with his 
father, and that he was not embarrassed by scruples. He 

1 Lady Suffolk's Letters, i. 10 1-4. 2 Camelford. (Italics his.) 

II 



LORD CHATHAM 

was, says Lord Camelford, ' a man of no character, and of 
parts that were calculated only for the knavery of business, 
in which he overreached others, and at last himself.' But 
Camelford may have been soured by the controversies 
which followed the Governor's death. The honours so 
dubiously acquired died out with Lord Londonderry's 
two sons. 

John, the Governor's third son, 'was in the army, an 
amiable vaurien, a personal favourite with the King, and, 
indeed, with all who knew him as a sort of Comte de 
Gramont, who contrived to sacrifice his health, his hon- 
our, his fortunes to a flow of libertinism which dashed 
the fairest prospect, and sank him for many years before 
his death in contempt and obscurity.' * This death took 
place, within Lord Camelford's memory, 'at the thatched 
house by the turnpike in Hammersmith.' John seems to 
have been a sort of Will Esmond, and we have on record 
a horse transaction of his which savours strongly of Thacke- 
ray's famous knave. 2 He married 'a sister of Lord Fau- 
conberg's, whose personal talents and accomplishments 
distinguished her as much at least as her birth, and much 
more than her virtues.' 3 

Another of Colonel John's freaks is worth retailing, as 
throwing light on the peremptory methods of the Pitts, 
and of the manner in which the Governor was harried by 
his offspring. He waited outside his father's house in Pall 
Mall on a day when he knew that one of the estate agents 
was to bring up the rents of an estate. He watched the 
man in and out of the house, then went in, where he found 
some secretary counting the money over, swept it deftly 
with his sword into his hat, and escaped into the street, 
full of glee at having bubbled an unappreciative parent 
out of his dues, and leaving the unhappy subordinate 

1 Camelford. J Dropmore Papers, i. 70. 3 Camelford. 

12 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

paralysed behind him. 1 This anecdote enables us to under- 
derstand why the Governor had so low an opinion of John, 
and why the keys were kept under the Governor's bed 
when this scapegrace was at home. 2 

Of the two daughters, Lucy, who married the first Earl 
Stanhope, the minister and general, seems to have left a 
fragrant memory behind her; we are pleased to find her 
resenting her sister-in-law's behaviour to her mother, the 
Governor's wife. She died in February, 1723-4. 

Essex, the second, married Charles Cholmondely, of 
Vale Royal, grandfather of the first Lord Delamere. ' Her 
peevishness made her the scourge of her family,' says her 
great-nephew, so we may conclude that she was not devoid 
of the Pitt characteristics. She died in 1754- 

Over his luckless heir the Governor had kept constant- 
ly suspended the terrors of his testamentary dispositions. 
'My resentments,' he wrote not long before his death, 
' against you all have been justly and honourably grounded, 
and that you will find when my head is laid.' Neverthe- 
less, when he died in 1726, Robert, the belaboured eldest 
son,' succeeded to the great bulk of his fortune. He, in 
his 'turn, did not lose a moment in visiting on his eldest 
son, Thomas, the sufferings that he himself had endured. 
In the very letter in which he announces his father's death 
to the lad, he speaks of his son's 'past slighting and dis- 
obedient conduct towards me,' and lectures him with un- 
compromising severity. He does, indeed, announce an 
allowance of 700/. a year, but soon after docks it of 200/. 
on the flimsiest and shabbiest pretexts. Robert, who 
seems to have been a poor creature, as his portrait at 
Boconnoc represents him, mean and cantankerous, with 
some of the violence but without the vigour and ability of 
the Governor, only survived his father a year, into which 

1 Camelford. 2 Dropmore Papers, i. 75. 

13 



LORD CHATHAM 

he managed to concentrate a creditable average of quarrels 
with his family. His death was something like the sinking 
of a fireship; spluttering and scolding he disappears in 1727. 

Robert's life and death were on the lines laid down by 
Pitt precedent. He lived and died on ill terms with his 
family, and his death was followed by the customary law- 
suits. During his short possession of his patrimony he had 
laboured under some miscalculation as to its extent; for, 
after examining the rentals and estates, he had congratu- 
lated himself on the possession of 'full 10,000/. a year'; 'in 
which belief he died soon after, leaving the same delusion 
to his son, which was one of the principal causes of his 
misfortunes.' 1 As the estate was entailed, Thomas, Rob- 
ert's eldest son, was not liable for the debts of his father, 
or anxious to assume that responsibility. The claims that 
gave him most trouble were those of his mother, Robert's 
widow, who had obtained additions to her jointure, and 
had had 10,000/. settled on her children at her marriage, 
a provision which was apparently never carried into exe- 
cution. Many bills and cross bills in Chancery were the 
consequence of these claims, which ended in Mrs. Robert 
Pitt's retirement into France, where she shortly afterwards 
died. Her brother and champion, Lord Grandison, also 
retreated to Ireland, both thus renouncing administration 
of the effects of Robert Pitt. 'So,' avows Lord Camelford, 
'my father seized whatever fell into his hands without 
account, either belonging to my grandfather or grand- 
mother, keeping at arm's length every demand upon him, 
till somehow or other these litigations seem to have worn 
themselves out and slept by the acquiescence of all parties.' 
The 'acquiescence,' we may add, seems only to have ac- 
crued by the death of the litigants. 

Robert left two sons and five daughters, and this brood 

1 Camelford. 
14 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

was not unworthy of the family traditions. The eldest son 
was Thomas, the second William, the subject of this book; 
to the daughters we shall come presently. 

The volcanic element in the Pitt blood was fully mani- 
fest in this generation, and Thomas was a child of wrath. 
His relations with his younger brother William seem always 
to have been uneasy, and from an early period they seem 
to have been wholly uncongenial to each other. 

Whatever William may have been, Thomas was imprac- 
ticable, and no one seems to have succeeded in working 
amicably with him. He was a man of extremes. 'All his 
passions,' writes his son, 'were violent by nature, particu- 
larly pride and ambition, which were painted in his figure, 
one of the most imposing I ever saw. He was not without 
good qualities; but, to speak fairly, they were greatly over- 
balanced by the contrary tendencies.' He was said not to 
have been naturally vicious, but early embarrassments, 
perpetual family litigations, a sense of injury, the flattery 
of dependents, and a train of mortifications and disap- 
pointments 'had formed in him such habits of rapacity, 
injustice and violence that he seemed at last to have lost 
even the sense of right and wrong.' He had, evidently, 
personal attractions, marred by an imperious demeanour, 
was strong and graceful, addicted to hunting and manly 
sports, fond of music and dancing. His overbearing man- 
ner, which arose from an undisguised contempt of his 
equals, gave him some ascendancy in Cornwall, where, 
however, though endured, he was secretly detested. 

So haughty and violent a character might, one supposes, 
have been mellowed and redeemed by a fortunate marriage, 
and Thomas seems to have secured an angel as his wife. 
At the opera one night he saw a daughter of Sir Thomas 
Lyttelton, was struck by her extraordinary beauty, pro- 
posed in his headlong manner next day, and was accepted. 

15 



LORD CHATHAM 

Her son laments her want of any fortune to remedy her 
husband's eternal embarrassments, but she seems to have 
lacked nothing else. Besides her loveliness, 'as a faithful 
wife, a tender mother, a kind friend, an indulgent mistress, 
she was a pattern to her sex.' * But her very virtues 
turned her husband against her. Her meek gentleness, 
humility, and charity, the extreme piety, carried almost 
to bigotry, in which she had been reared, were reproachful 
contrasts to his opposite qualities. She was the object of 
ridicule to the wit and malice of others, possibly, we should 
guess, of her sisters-in-law; and, finally, every kind senti- 
ment, even of common humanity, towards her, was ex- 
tinguished in the husband who had loved her so passionately. 

Thomas seems, from the moment of succession until 
death, to have been a prey to pecuniary embarrassment. 
He started with an exaggerated view of his resources, and 
launched into extravagance; arrogance and ambition made 
him more profuse; a taste for borough management, strong 
in him, was probably more expensive than any other pos- 
sible form of gambling; so all his life was soured by the 
struggle between pride and debt, and by consequent morti- 
fication. This seems to be the secret of his wasted and 
unhappy existence. 

United as he was by his marriage to the Lytteltons, 
Grenvilles, and Cobham, he naturally became an adherent 
and favourite of the Prince of Wales. He probably called 
the Prince's attention in glowing terms to the possibilities 
of the Heir Apparent 's Duchy of Cornwall, and, at any 
rate, became His Royal Highness's parliamentary manager 
in the West, the realm of rotten boroughs. There the 
Prince was flattered, or flattered himself, with influence as 
Duke of Cornwall, in a region where Lord Falmouth, the 
famous threatener of 'we are seven,' and Thomas himself 

1 Camelford. 
16 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

exercised a more substantial sway. He enjoyed a fleeting 
triumph at the General Election of 1741, not unaccom- 
panied with the constant quarrels which were the vital 
element of his family. As a reward he was appointed in 
1742 Warden of the Stannaries. 

Then he seems to decay. The General Election of 
1747, on which he had built high hopes, brought him 
nothing but debt and disaster. He writes in despair to 
the Prince, and Frederick sends kindly and reassuring 
messages in reply; but he was now ruined, and his last 
prospects vanished with the - Prince of Wales, on whose 
death he was superseded in the Stannaries; this perhaps 
marks the date of his final catastrophe. At any rate, 
there was a financial collapse, and he had to go abroad. 
Shelburne met him at Utrecht and heard him hold forth 
in the true Pitt style, abusing his brother William as a 
hypocrite and scoundrel, with a great flow of language 
and a quantity of illustrative anecdotes. 'A bad man,' 
says Horace Walpole. 'Never was ill-nature so dull as 
his, never dullness so vain.' 

Shelburne hints that he was mad, or nearly mad, and 
that, though not actually confined, he was obliged to live 
a very retired life, complicated by straitened circumstances. 
'The unhappy man,' as William calls him, had never been 
on cordial terms with his brother: they had had the usual 
family wrangles about property, and recently, in his dis- 
tress, Thomas had solicited from William, now Secretary 
of State and supreme, the appointment of Minister to the 
Swiss Cantons.- He might have foreseen refusal, for he 
was fit for no such employment, and William was sensitive 
as to charges of favour to his family from the Crown. But 
men are friendly judges of their own fitness for any post 
which they may happen to desire, and Thomas did not 
care, probably, to have his merits or demerits so justly 

17 



LORD CHATHAM 

appraised by his junior; so he spent his time of exile in 
denouncing to any audience that was attracted by his 
name, the ingratitude and neglect of his successful relative. 
He died in July 1761, and William frigidly announces to 
his nephew the death of 'the unhappy man' from apo- 
plexy. 

This nephew was created Lord Camelford under the 
auspices of his first cousin, the younger Pitt, whom, by 
the way, Pitt-like, he seems unable to forgive for this 
favour, as he never mentions his creator. The malicious 
bards of the Rolliad hinted that the peerage accrued from 
some borough-mongering transaction: 

' Say, what gave Camelford his wished for rank ? 
Did he devote old Sarum to the Bank? 
Or did he not, that envied rank to gain, 
Transfer the victim to the Treasury's fame ? (sic) ' 

But, though he was by no means destitute of the family 
characteristics, this Thomas was a man of high honour, 
character and charm. He won the heart of Horace Wal- 
pole, whose neighbour he was, until they quarrelled, as 
of course they were sure to do. But for a time Horace, 
whose affection was not often or easily given and whose 
confidence in matters of taste was fastidious, gave both 
affection and confidence unstintedly to this young man. 
He attracted, too, the still rarer tenderness of his uncle 
William. To him Chatham addressed the well-known 
letters on education which he found time to write in all 
the business of office; though Thomas on attaining man- 
hood repaid him with the most cordial aversion. This 
sentiment, which seems at first to savour of ingratitude, is 
not in reality difficult to explain. In the first place, the 
uncle was to some extent involved in those financial ques- 
tions connected with the paternal inheritance in which 

18 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

the father played, as we have seen, so intrepid though 
unscrupulous a part. Mutual aversion facilitated mutual 
disagreement in matters always fertile of friction; and the 
younger Thomas, though he had an ill opinion of his father, 
sided with him as against his uncle. We cannot, even on 
Thomas's own showing, blame the uncle in these rather 
petty transactions, and William's besetting sin was cer- 
tainly not avarice; but neither can we blame the son for 
siding with the father. On an impartial survey we may 
conclude that disputes between two Pitts who were near 
descendants of the Governor were incapable of an amicable 
solution. 

But there was more than this. William, for some pur- 
pose of persuasion, says Lord Camelford, informed Thomas 
that his nephew, the younger Thomas (Lord Camelford 
himself), would be his heir. This was a considerable, al- 
most a magnificent, prospect. William was then middle- 
aged and unmarried, his position and future were alike 
splendid, and high office might in those days lead to wealth. 
His career had, moreover, brought him a legacy of io,oooZ. 
from Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough. But, far beyond 
that, there was the reversion of the great Althorp inherit- 
ance, between which and William there were only the lives 
of the short-lived possessor and his sickly child. That 
William held out this expectation we think so probable 
that we do not even question it. He had all his life been 
half an invalid, and never seems to have contemplated 
marriage till he did marry, at the age of forty-eight. He, 
moreover, loved his nephew with sincere and proved ten- 
derness. Why, then, should it be doubted that he in- 
dicated him as his heir, when, in truth, he had no other? 
But that he did this with an unworthy motive or for the 
purpose of deception there is neither proof nor probability. 
The episode probably furnished matter for his brother's 

19 



LORD CHATHAM 

maudlin ravings at Utrecht, but we do not think that it 
materially influenced the opinions of his nephew. 

The true reason for Camelford's hatred of his uncle was 
that he fell under the influence of George Grenville at a 
time when Grenville had broken for ever with Pitt. The 
estimable qualities of Grenville have been described with a 
colour and exuberance which could only proceed from the 
glowing imagination of Burke. But, with all allowance for 
what Burke saw in this able, narrow, and laborious person, 
it cannot be denied that the foundation of his qualities was 
a stubborn self-esteem which necessarily led to stubborn 
hatreds. Grenville came to hate Bute, to hate the King, 
to hate the Duke of Cumberland; but it may be doubted 
if all his other accumulated hatreds equalled that which he 
felt for his brother-in-law. Pitt, while in office, had kept 
Grenville in a subordinate position, and had apparently 
thought it adequate to his deserts. When Grenville was 
Minister, Pitt had negotiated with the King to overthrow 
him. In the schism produced by Pitt's resignation, Temple 
had sided with Pitt and quarrelled with his brother George. 
But, worst of all, Pitt had held Grenville up, not unsuccess- 
fully, to public ridicule and contempt. Now, a Grenville 
to himself was not as other men are; he was something 
sacred and ineffable. Neither Temple nor George ever 
doubted that they were the equals, nay, the superiors, of 
their brother-in-law, whom in their hearts they regarded as 
only a brilliant adventurer, useful, under careful guidance, 
to the Grenville scheme of creation. When, therefore, 
Pitt quizzed and thwarted George, he raised an implacable 
enemy. Later on, they might affect reconciliation, and 
Temple might pompously announce to the world that the 
Brethren were reunited. But George's undying resent- 
ment against Pitt never nagged to the hour of his death. 

Thomas Pitt came under Grenville's influence at the 

20 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

fiercest moment of this rancour, and seems to have been 
the only person on record who was fascinated by him, 
Thomas writes of him with affectionate enthusiasm long 
after his death, and in his life waged his wars with zeal. 
One of these led to a quarrel with Horace Walpole, arising 
out of the dismissal of Conway, which produced a lengthy 
correspondence, still extant. But to become the disciple 
of George Grenville it was necessary to abhor William Pitt. 
Thomas took the test without difficulty, and adhered to it 
conscientiously. His father's influence, such as it was, 
tended in the same direction. So, though Thomas specifi- 
cally places his uncle at the head of all British statesmen, 
and although he besought Chatham to sit to Reynolds for 
the gallery at Boconnoc, and though he displayed grief, 
real or ostentatious, at Chatham's death, going the quaint 
length of asking every one to dinner who spoke sympa- 
thetically in either House on the occasion; in spite of all 
this, he retails aversion in every sentence that he writes; 
aversion of which the obvious source is devotion to Gren- 
ville. It is necessary to explain this because Camelford's 
manuscript notes would otherwise be inexplicable. Put- 
ting this violent prejudice on one side, this memorial drawn 
up by Camelford for his son, though too intimate for com- 
plete publication, is a priceless document. Let all be for- 
given him for the sake of this manuscript. It may be 
inaccurate, and biassed and acrid, but it presents the family 
circle from within by one of themselves, and no more vivid 
picture can exist of that strange cockatrice brood of Pitts. 

The son for whom it was written grew up a spitfire, not 
less eccentric than his sires, and became notorious as the 
second Lord Camelford. His was a turbulent, rakehelly, 
demented existence, the theme of many newspaper para- 
graphs. He revived in his person all the pranks and out- 
rage of the Mohawks. Bull-terriers, bludgeons, fighting of 

3 21 



LORD CHATHAM 

all kinds were associated with him; riots of all kinds were 
as the breath of his nostrils, more especially theatrical 
tumults. One of these latter contests brought him into 
contact with the pacific authors of the 'Rejected Ad- 
dresses,' who were admitted, not without trepidation, to 
his apartment, which was almost an arsenal. It can scarce- 
ly be doubted that the lurking madness of the Pitts found 
a full expression in him. As an officer in the Navy, com- 
manding a sloop in the West Indies, his conduct fell little 
if at all short of insanity. It is not easy to understand 
how even in those more facile times he escaped disgrace. 

Eventually, at the age of twenty-nine he was killed in 
a wanton duel with a Mr. Best. The circumstances of 
this mortal combat show that he was a true Pitt of the 
Governor's headstrong breed. Both before the duel and 
afterwards, on his death-bed, he acknowledged that he 
was the sole wanton aggressor, and that his antagonist 
was blameless. But as Mr. Best was reported the best 
pistol-shot in England, his pride would not allow him to 
lend himself, however indirectly, to any sort of accommoda- 
tion. So he died, and with him died the eldest line of the 
Governor's branch of Pitts. Boconnoc passed to his sister, 
Lady Grenville, wife of the minister who was Chatham's 
nephew. The relations of the brothers-in-law seem to 
have been on the Pitt model. ' Pique against Lord Gren- 
ville explains his (Lord Camelford's) conduct,' writes Lady 
Holland. 1 Despite all their idiosyncrasies it seemed im- 
possible to keep the Pitts and Grenvilles from quarrelling 
and blending. 

All this may seem trivial enough, but it has an impor- 
tant, indeed necessary, bearing on the story of William's 
life, as showing the stock from which he sprang. 

The harsh passions of the Governor and the petulant 

1 Journal, ii. 45. 

22 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

violence of his heirs seem so outrageous and uncontrolled 
as to verge on actual insanity. Shelburne explicitly states 
that 'there was a great deal of madness in the family.' 
Every indication confirms this statement. What seemed 
in the Governor brutality and excess, frequently developed 
in his descendants into something little if at all short of 
mental disorder. We thus trace to their source the germs 
of that haughty, impossible, anomalous character, distem- 
pered at times beyond the confines of reason, which made 
William so difficult to calculate or comprehend. 



LORD CHATHAM 



CHAPTER II 

AND now we come by a process of exhaustion to the 
L subject of this book. 

William Pitt, the elder statesman of that name, was 
born in London, in the parish of St. James's, November 
15, 1708. It does not now seem possible to trace the 
house of his nativity, but it was probably in Pall Mall, 
where his father then or afterwards resided. We are 
limited to the information that his godfathers were ' Cousin 
Pitt ' (probably George Pitt of Strathfieldsaye) and General 
Stewart, after the latter of whom he was named. General 
Stewart was the second husband of William's grandmother, 
Lady Grandison. 1 

It may be well to recall here that William was the 
second son of Robert Pitt, the Governor's eldest son, and 
his wife, Harriot Villiers, fourth daughter of Catherine, 
Viscountess Grandison, and her husband the Hon. Edward 
Villiers Fitzgerald, who was descended from a brother of 
the first Villiers, Duke of Buckingham. 

Of his childhood we catch but occasional and remote 
glimpses. 

His grandfather, as we have seen, had early marked him. 
The shrewd old nabob had discerned the boy's possibilities, 
but seems also to have determined that his energies should 
not be relaxed by wealth. At any rate, the Governor 
refrained from any special sign of favour, and bequeathed 
the lad only an annuity of 100/. a year. This was William's 

1 Dropmore Papers, i. 38, 41. 
24 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

sole patrimony, for he seems to have received nothing from 
his father. 

He was sent to Eton, or, as William always spells it, 
'Eaton,' at an early age; the exact period does not seem 
to be ascertainable. Here he had notable contemporaries: 
Henry Fox, George Lyttelton, Charles Pratt, Hanbury 
Williams, and Fielding. 

'Thee,' said this last, addressing Learning, 'in the 
favourite fields, where the limpid gently rolling Thames 
washes thy Etonian banks, in early youth I have wor- 
shipped. To thee, at thy birchen altar, with true Spartan 
devotion I. have sacrificed my blood.' * Pitt could have 
echoed his schoolfellow's apostrophe if the not improbable 
legend be true that he underwent an unusually severe 
flogging for having been caught out of bounds. But even 
without this, his experiences were no doubt poignant 
enough; for, though the son of a wealthy father, he was 
placed on the foundation, and the Eton of those days 
afforded to its King's Scholars no lap of luxury. The 
horrors and hardships of Long Chamber, the immense dor- 
mitory of these lads, have come down to us in a whisper of 
awful tradition, and it is therefore no matter for surprise, 
though it is for regret, that William did not share the 
passionate devotion of most Etonians for their illustrious 
college. He is credited indeed with saying that he had 
scarcely ever observed a boy who was not cowed for life 
at Eton 2 : a sweeping condemnation which sounds strange 
in these days, but which is easily explained by the misery 
that he, as a sickly boy, may well have undergone in that 
petty Lacedagmon. For his health deprived him of all the 
pleasures of his age, as he was already a martyr to gout. 
That hereditary malady which cut him off from the sports 
of the school impelled him to study, and so served his 

1 Tom Jones, Book xiii. Chapter i. 2 Life of Shelburne, i. 72. 

25 



LORD CHATHAM 

career. Mr. Thackeray, who wrote his biography in quarto 
and who may be discriminated without difficulty from the 
genius of that name, deposes vaguely that 'Dr. Bland, at 
that time the headmaster of Eton, is said to have highly 
valued the attainments of his pupil.' We rest more se- 
curely on a letter of his Eton tutor, Mr. Burchett, of which 
the last sentence need only be quoted here, as it is all that 
relates to William. 

Mr. Burchett to Mr. Pitt. 

Y r younger Son has made a great Progress since his coming 
hither, indeed I never was concern'd with a young Gentleman 
of so good Abilities, & at the same time of so good a disposition, 
and there is no question to be made but he will answer all y r 
Hopes. 

I am, S r , 

Y r most Obedient & most Humble Servant, 

Will: Burchett. 1 

This reference under the hand of an Eton tutor is 
exuberant enough. But no doubt rests on Pitt's school 
reputation. It survived even to the time of Shelburne, 
who speaks of him as distinguished at Eton. Lyttelton 
wrote of him while still there: 'This (good-humor) to 
Pitt's genius adds a brighter grace'; 2 a remarkable tribute 
from one Eton boy to another. More striking still is the 
tradition preserved by an unfriendly witness, William's 
nephew, Camelford. 'The surprising Genius of Lord 
Chatham,' he writes, 'distinguished him as early as at 
Eaton School, where he and his friend Lord Lyttelton in 
different ways were looked up to as prodigies.' School 
prodigies rarely mellow into remarkable men; though re- 

1 Addresed: To Robert Pitt, Esq r , at Stratford, near Old Sarum, Wilts. 
Endorsed: 'Mr. Burchet's letter about my Sons att Eton. Feb 1 ? 4th, 1722.' 

2 Lyttelton's Misc. Works, p. 650. 'Written at Eaton School, 1729.' The 
date is obviously wrong, for Pitt and Lyttelton both went to Oxford in 1726. 

26 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

markable men are often credited, when their reputation is 
secure, with having been school prodigies. But the con- 
temporary letter of Burchett and the reluctant testimony 
of Camelford admit of no doubts. Most significant, per- 
haps, of all is the preservation of the flotsam of school life, 
a couple of school bills, the tutor's letter, another from 
the boy himself. This last, which took eleven days in 
transmission, is here given. The bills have been already 
published by Sir Henry Lyte, in his History of Eton. 

William Pitt to his Father. 

Eaton, Septemb r y e 2g ih . 
Hon ed S r , — I write this to pay my duty to you, and to lett 
you know that I am well, I hope you and my mama have found 
a great benefit from the Bath, and it would be a very great satis- 
faction to me, to hear how you do, I was in hopes of an answer 
to my last letter, to have heard how you both did, and I should 
direct my letters, to you; for not knowing how to direct my let- 
ters, has hindered me writing to you. my time has been pretty 
much taken up for this three weeks, in my trying for to gett into 
the fiveth form, And I am now removed into it ; pray my duty to 
my mama and service to my uncle and aunt Stuart if now att 
the Bath. I am with great respect, Hon ed S r , Your most 

dutiful Son, 

W. Pitt. 1 

This is the whole record extant of William's Eton life; 
to so many lads the happiest period of their existence, but 
not to him. An invalid, and so disabled for games, a 
recluse, perhaps a victim, he had no pleasant memories of 
Eton. But there, in all probability, he laid the founda- 
tions of character and intellect on which his fame was to 
be reared. It is not usually profitable to imagine pictures 
of the past, but it may not be amiss to evoke, in passing, 

1 Endorsed: 'from my Son William Sept. 29 th : rec d Oct. 10 th , 1723.' 

27 



LORD CHATHAM 

the shadow of the lean, saturnine boy as he limped by the 
Thames, shaping a career, or pondering on life and destiny, 
dreaming of greatness where so many have dreamed, while 
he watched, half enviously, half scornfully, the sports in 
which he might not join. He is not the first, and will not 
be the last, to find his school a salutary school of adversity. 
He looked back to it with no gratitude. But Eton claims 
him for her own ; and long generations of reluctant students 
have whiled away the reputed hours of learning or exami- 
nation by gazing at his bust in Upper School, and dreamily 
conjecturing why so great a glamour still hangs about his 
name. 

With these few remnants and this vague surmise ends 
all that is, or will probably ever be, known of William's 
childhood. Little enough if we compare it to the copious 
details furnished by modern autobiographers. But self- 
revelation was not the fashion of the eighteenth century, 
and childhood then furnished less to record. Boys were in 
the background, repressing their emotions, and inured to a 
rugged discipline which, though odious to the sympathetic 
delicacy of modern civilisation, produced the men who 
made the Empire. 

From Eton, Pitt proceeded to Oxford, where he was 
admitted a Gentleman Commoner at Trinity College on 
January ioth, 1726 (o.s.), guided thither, probably, by the 
fact that his uncle, Lord Stanhope, had been a member of 
that society. There are indications that at this time he 
was destined, like a great minister of a recent day, for the 
Church, but the gout attacked him with such violence as 
to compel him to leave the University without taking his 
degree. We have, however, an indirect proof of the repu- 
tation which he brought to Oxford in a letter from a Mr. 
Stockwell, who, although he had determined to give up 
tuition, consents to take William as his pupil, partly as a 

28 



HLS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

'Salsbury man,' and so owing respect to the Pitt family; 
partly because of 'the character I hear of Mr. Pitt on all 
hands.' 

William's only public achievement at Oxford was a 
copy of Latin verses which he published on the death of 
George I. They are artificial and uncandid, as is the nat- 
ure of such compositions, and have been justly ridiculed by 
Lord Macaulay. But the performance is at least an early 
mark of ambition. If this be all, and it is all, that we 
know of this period of William's life, it seems worth while 
to print the two letters written by Mr. Stockwell to Robert 
Pitt, the more as they throw some light on bygone Oxford, 
a topic of evergreen interest. 

Mr. I. Stockwell to Robert Pitt. 

Hon ed S r , — I had long since determin'd, not to engage any 
more in a Trust of so much consequence, as the Care of a young 
Gentleman of Fortune is, & have in fact refus'd many offers of 
that sort: but the great Regard, that every Salsbury-Man must 
have for your Family, and the Character I hear of M r Pitt from 
All Hands, put it out of my Power to decline a Proposal of so 
much Credit & Advantage to Myself & the College. I heartily 
wish your Business and Health would have allow'd you to have 
seen him settled here, because I flatter Myself, that you would 
have left Him in Our Society with some Degree of Satisfaction ; 
as That can't be hop'd for, You will assure Yourself that every- 
thing shall be done with the exactest Care and Fidelity. 

I have secur'd a very good Room for M r Pitt, which is just 
now left by a Gentleman of Great Fortune, who is gone to the 
Temple. Tis thoroughly furnish't & with All necessarys, but 
perhaps may require some little Additional Expence for Orna- 
ment or Change of Furniture. The method of paying for the 
Goods of any Room in the University is, that Every Person 
leaving the College receives of his Successor Two Thirds of what 
He has expended. On this foot the Mony to be paid by M r Pitt 
to the Gentleman who possess't the Room last, is 43 \ Two thirds 

29 



LORD CHATHAM 

of which, as likewise of whatever Addition He shall please to 
make to the Furniture, He is to receive again of the Person, who 
succeeds Him. 

Tis usual for Young Gentlemen of Figure to have a small 
quantity of Table-Linnen, & sometimes some particular peices 
of plate, for the reception of Any Friend in their Rooms, but 
everything of that sort for Common & Publick Uses is provided 
by the College. 

If you please to send me the Servitor's Name, I will imme- 
diately procure His admission into the College, & show Him all 
the Kindness in my Power, but as to His attendance on M r Pitt 
it is not now usual in the University, nor, as I apprehend, can 
be of any Service. Tis much more Customary & Creditable to 
a Gentleman of Family to be attended by a Footman — But this 
I barely mention. 

The other Expences of M r Pitt's Admission will be in the 
following Articles: 

Caution Mony (to be return'd again) . .1000 
Benefaction to the College . . . 10 o o 
For Admission to the Fellow's Common 

Room . . . . . .200 

Fee for the Use of the College Plate, &c. 200 

College Serv ts Fees 1 1 5 o 

University Fees . . . . o 16 o 

I have stated M r Pitt's Benefaction at Ten Pounds, because 
that is what we require & receive of every Gentleman-Commoner, 
& of very many Commoners; but I know S r that you will excuse 
me for mentioning, that several Young Gentlemen of M r Pitt's 
Gown have besides made the College a Present of a Peice of Plate 
of 10, or 12 1 . I am thus particular only in Obedience to Your 
Orders. I believe S r if You please to remit a BilLof An Hundred 
Pounds, it will answer the whole expence of Mr. Pitt's settlement 
here and I shall have the Honour to send you a particular Account 
of the disposal of it. As I am debarr'd the Pleasure of waiting 
on You by a little Office, that Confines me to the College in 
Termtime, I shall take it a very great Favour, if you please to 
let me know at what time I may hope to see M r Pitt here. 

3° 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

I beg my Humble Duty to Your Good Lady, & my Humble 
Service & Respects to M r Pitt, and am with the highest Respect 
S r Y r most Oblig'd & Obedient Serv* 

Ios. Stockwell. 1 

Mr. Stockwell to Robert Pitt, 'at Swallowfield 
near Reading, Berks.' 

Trim Coll: Oxon: Dec r 22. 1726. 

Hon rd S r , — Upon receiving the favour of Yours & finding 
that it was your Intention that M r Pitt should keep a Servant, 
I have made choice of Another Room much more Convenient 
for that Purpose, as it supply's a Lodging for His Footman. I 
have employ'd some Workmen in it to make some necessary 
alterations ; but the whole expence will not amount to the Charge 
of the Chamber, I had mention'd to you before. As I am not 
willing, M r Pitt should be put to the distress of lying One Night 
in an Inn, I will take Care, it shall be fit for his Reception by 
New Years Day, & I am sure He will like it very well. 

I proposed so large a Sum, because I had not mention'd the 
Articles of Gown, Cap Bands, Tea-Furniture, & some other little 
Ornaments & Conveniences that young Gentlemen don't care 
to be without. You will be pleas'd to mention, in what degree 
of mourning 2 His Gown must be made ; & I will send you an exact 
Account of the whole expence. There is no need of remitting 
any Mony, till He comes. 

If You are willing to recommend the Servitor You spoke of, 
who may live here at a very easy rate (I believe very well for 
15 1 p. Ann) I have bespoke a place for him, & He may be admitted 
when you please. I beg My Humble Duty to Your Good Lady, 
& my Humble Service & Respects to Your Good Family, & am 
S r Y r most Obliged & Obedient Serv* 

Ios. Stockwell. 3 

Fortunately, too, a few of William's Oxford letters 
have also been preserved. The first apologetically con- 

1 Endorsed : ' from Mr. Stockwell about y e charges of my Sons going to 
Oxon: Nov r 1726 ans d Dec r ist.' 2 Mourning for the Governor. 

3 Endorsed: 'from M r Stockwell about my Son W m from Oxon: Dec r 2 2 d 
ansd 29 th 1726.' 

3 1 



LORD CHATHAM 



tinues Stockwell's tale of preliminary expenses, and en- 
deavours to deprecate Robert Pitt's economical wrath. 

William Pitt to his Father in Pall Mall. 

Trim Coll: Jan ry Y e 20'* 1726/7. 
Hon ed S r , — After such delay, though not owing to any negli- 
gence on my Part, I am ashamed to send you y e following ac- 
compt, without first making great apologies for not executing 
y e Commands sooner. 

Matriculation Fees . 

Caution money 

Benefaction .... 

Utensils of y e Coll 

Common Room 

Coll: Serv ts Fees 

Paddesway ' Gown . 

Cap ...... 

Tea Table, China ware, bands &c. 
Glasses ..... 

Thirds of Chamber & Furniture 
Teaspoons .... 

Summe total . 

Balance p d me by M r Stockwell 

I have too much reason to fear you may think some of these 
articles too extravagant, as they really are, but all I have to 
say for it is humbly to beg you would not attribute it to my 
extravagance, but to y e custom of this Place; where we pay for 
most things too at a high rate. 

I must again repeat my wishes for y r health, hoping you 
have not been prevented by so painfull a delay as y e gout from 
pursuing y r intended journey to Town I must beg leave to sub- 
join my Duty to my Mother & love to my Sist rs and am with all 
Possible respect S r Y r most dutyfull Son 

Wm. Pitt. 2 

1 Paduasoy. 

2 Endorsed: 'from my Son Will m Oxon Jan? 20 th w th y e ace* y e ioo 1 answ d 








16 


6 




10 










10 










2 










2 










I 


15 







8 


5 










7 







6 


5 










11 







■ 4i 


7 


8 




1 


7 


6 


84 


14 


8 


• 15 


05 


4 



ye 24 1 



1726/7.' 



32 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

The next is written after an evident explosion of that 
wrath. In the Pitt family, even more than in others, 
father and son viewed filial expenditure from opposite 
points of view. It is painful, then, but not surprising to 
find that Robert should have regarded William's washing 
bill as beyond the dreams of luxury. 

William Pitt to his Father, 'in Pall Mall.' 

Trin: Coll: April y e 29^ 
Hon ed S r — I rec d y rs of y e 25 th in which I find with y e utmost 
concern y e dissatisfaction you express at my expences. To 
pretend to justify, or defend myself in this case would be, I fear, 
with reason thought impertinent; tis sufficient to convince me 
of the extravagance of my expences, that they have met with y r 
disapprobation, but might I have leave to instance an Article 
or two, perhaps you may not think 'em so wild and boundless, 
as with all imaginable uneasiness, I see you do at present. Wash- 
ing 2I. is. od., about 35. 6d. per w k , of which money half a dozen 
shirts at $d. each comes to 2s. per w k , shoes and stockings igs. 
od. Three pairs of Shoes at $s. each, two pair of Stockings, 
one silk, one worcestead, are all that make up this Article, but 
be it as it will, since, S r , you judge my expence too great, I must 
endeavour for y e future to lessen it, & shall be contented with 
whatever you please to allow me. one considerable article is 
a servant, an expence which many are not at, and which I shall 
be glad to spare, if you think it fitt, in hopes to convince you 
I desire nothing superfluous; as I have reason to think you will 
not deny me what is necessary. As you have been pleased to 
give me leave I shall draw upon you for 25" as soon as I have 
occasion. I beg my duty to my Mother & am with all possible 
respect 

Hon ed S r , y r most Dutifull Son 

W. Pitt. 

The third is mysterious enough to us, but it expresses 
gratitude for some marks of kindness, whether to the writer 
or not, cannot now be known. It is difficult to imagine 

33 



LORD CHATHAM 

that Robert should have extended his beneficence to any 
one at Trinity but William, and yet it is not easy to depict 
the gratitude of a College for a favour done to one of their 
undergraduates by his father. In any case there remains 
no longer any trace of such benefaction at Trinity. The 
inevitable financial statement in which the bookseller's bill 
figures handsomely, not far behind the tailor's, is tactfully 
kept separate in a postscript. It is, however, well to know 
that this letter, the last in all probability that William 
wrote to his father, who died six weeks afterwards, is one 
of as much affection as the fashion of that day permitted.. 

William Pitt to his Father. 

Trim Coll: April y e 10^ 1727. 
Hon ed S r , — I hope you gott well to London yesterday as I 
did to this place, though too late to trouble you with a letter 
that Evening. I cannot say how full of acknowledgements 
every one amongst us is for y e fav r you confer'd upon one of 
their society. One could almost imagine by y e good wishes I 
hear express' t toward you from all hands, you were rather a 
publick benefactor to y e College, than a Patron to any one mem- 
ber of it. I mention this because I believe it will not be unac- 
ceptable to you to hear y r fav re are gratefully rec d . I hope my 
Mother is well, to whom I beg my Duty: & am with all possible 
respect, $> r , 

Y r most dutifull son, 

Wm. Pitt. 

S r , — Finding y e quarter just up I send you y e following ac- 
compt commencing Jan ry y e 9 th to y e 9 th of this month. 



Battels ...... 

Paid Lambert b d Wages 
Three months learning french & entrance 
For a course of experimental Philosophy 
For coat & breeches & making 
Booksellers bill ..... 

34 



15 o o 
440 
220 
220 
5 18 o 
500 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 



Cambrick for ruffles .... 


i 


4 


o 


Shoes, stockings 


i 


*9 





Candles, coal, fagots .... 


3 


IO 


o 


Pockett money, Gloves, Powder, Tea, &c. 


4 


4 


o 


For washing 


2 


2 


o 




47 


5 


o 


Remains .... 


9 


i5 


o 



Robert Pitt died in Paris, May 20, 1727, and the next 
letter is addressed to his widow at Bath. The eldest son, 
Thomas, already, it would appear, had played William 
false, and caused a coolness with the mother by not deliver- 
ing a letter. 

William Pitt to his Mother. 

Oxford July y e 10^ 1727. 
Hon ed Mad m , — Tis with no small impatience I have waited 
for y e pleasure of hearing from you, but as that is denied me, 
I take this opportunity of repeating my Duty and enquiries 
after y r health. I wrote to you by return of y e coach, enclos'd 
to my Brother, to be forwarded by him, from whom I have also 
received no answer, which makes me imagine you may not have 
less reason to be angry with me for not paying my Duty to you, 
than I have to be sorry at not having y e pleasure to hear from 
you, I mean my letter has not come into y r hands. I send this 
by y e Post from hence, which I hope will find better luck, it will 
be a sensible pleasure to me to hear y e waters agree with you: 
for w ch reason out of kindness to me, as also in regard to y r own 
quiet (lest I should trouble you every other post with an impor- 
tuning epistle) be so good as to give y e satisfaction of hearing 
you are well; I am with all respect, 

Y r most Dutifull Son, 

Wm. Pitt. 

1 Endorsed: 'from my Son Will m Aprill 10 th w th an ace 1 

of 3 mo s expences 47 05 o 

Rem s in his hand 9 15 o 

In all 57 00 

Answ d Aprill 25 th , w th leave to draw for 25 1 .' 

35 



LORD CHATHAM 

The following letter would seem to indicate that William 
was spending the Long Vacation at Oxford, while his 
mother as usual was spending hers at Bath. He appears 
to hint disapproval of an acquaintance she wished him to 
make, reversing the usual position of parent and son on 
such matters. There is again reproachful allusion to his 
brother; there are few indeed in any other tone throughout 
William's correspondence. 

William Pitt to his Mother 'at Bath.' 

Oxon Sepf y e 17* 1727. 

Hon ed Mad m , — I rec'd y e favour of y rs by M r Mayo and have 
waited on M r Vesey as you order'd, with whom, had you not 
recommended him to me upon y e knowledge you have of his 
family, I should not have sought an acquaintance. I hope you 
will lett me hear soon y r intentions. If I am not to be happy 
in seeing you hear, y e certainty of it can not be more uneasy 
than the apprehension; if I am, I shall gain so much happiness, 
by y e foreknowledge of it. What part of y e world my Brother 
is in or when he will be in Town, I know not. I hope to hear 
from him between this and y e Coronation. The only considera- 
tion y* can make me give up quietly y e pleasure I promis'd myself 
in seeing you here, is y t you are employ'd in a more important 
care to y r self and Family, y e preservation of y r health. I have 
only to add my love to my Sist er and am with all respect, 

Y r most dutifull son 

Wm. Pitt. 

The gout, we have seen, drove William prematurely 
from Oxford, after a little more than a year of residence. 
Thence he proceeded to Utrecht, where it was then not 
unusual for young Englishmen and Scotsmen to complete 
their education. Here we find him in 1728 with his cousin 
Lord Villiers and Lord Buchan, father of the grotesque 
egotist of that name and of Henry and Thomas Erskine. 
Pitt writes in 1766 that Buchan was his intimate friend 

36 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

from the period that they were students together at Utrecht, 
and, when in office, he showed kindness on that ground to 
Lord Cardross, Buchan's eldest son, the egotist himself. 
Of this period some few letters to his mother survive, duti- 
ful yet playful. 

The first letter is of the formal kind then general be- 
tween sons and parents, mentioning his cousin Lord Villiers, 
for whom he puts in a good word, not unnecessarily, as we 
shall see presently. 

William Pitt to his Mother. 

Utrecht, Feb ry y e 6 th N.S. 1728. 

Hon ed Mad m , — I have y e pleasure to repeat my assurances of 
affection & duty to you, together with my wishes for y r health : 
I shall take all opportunities for paying my respects to you, I 
hope you will now and then fav r me w th a line or two, especially 
since you have so good a Scribe as Miss Ann to ease you of y e 
trouble of writing y r self. My L d Villiers begs his Compliments 
may be acceptable to you, at y e same time I should not do my 
L d justice if I omitted saying something in his just praise, but as 
I can not say enough, I forbear to say more. My Love to my 
Sist rs & Compliments where due. I am with all resp* 

Your dutiful Son 

Wm. Pitt. 

The next seems to denote a reluctant intention of re- 
turning to England to pay his family a visit. 

William Pitt to his Mother. 

Utrecht Feb ry y e 13* 1728. 
Hon ed Mad m , — I hope I need not assure you y r letter gave 
me a very sensible pleasure in informing me of y r better health; 
I wish I may any way be able to contribute toward farther 
establishment of it by obeying a Command which tallies so well 
with my own Inclinations though at y e same time be assured, 
nothing less than y e pleasure of seeing you should prevail upon 

4 37 



LORD CHATHAM 

me to repeat so much sickness & difficulty as I met with Coming 
over to Holland. I believe I shall not fail in my respects to you, 
as often as occasion permits, though I fear my letters are hardly 
worth postage: unless to one who I flatter myself believes me 
to be 

h r most Dutifull Son 
P.S. my Love to all y e Family. Wm. Pitt. 

The next letter again pleads on behalf of my Lord 
Villiers, for whose excess of vivacity William feels obvious 
sympathy. He mentions, too, and characterises with a 
sure touch, his old Eton friend Lyttelton, who has fallen 
in love with Harriot Pitt, as he was afterwards to fall 
in love with Ann. Lyttelton was apparently determined 
that the Lytteltons and Pitts should be matrimonially con- 
nected as closely as possible, for two months afterwards 
we find him exclaiming in a letter to his father : ' Would to 
God Mr. (William) Pitt had a fortune equal to his brother's, 
that he might make a present of it to my pretty little 
Molly! But unhappily they have neither of them any 
portion but an uncommon share of merit, which the world 
will not think them much the richer for.' l As Thomas 
had just married Christian Lyttelton, it is clear that the 
writer meditated a triple alliance as the end to be aimed 
at. The peerage books tell us that this pretty little Molly 
died unmarried. 

William Pitt to his Mother, 'in Pallmall, London.' 

Utrecht Feb: y e 2g th 

Hon ed Mad m , — The return of my L d Villiers into England 
gives me an opportunity of assuring you of my respect & wishes 
for y r health; I can not omitt any occasion of shewing how 
sensible I am of y r affection, but must own I could have wish'd 
any other than this by which I am depriv'd of my L d Villier's 

1 Lyttelton, Misc. Works, 665. 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

Company, he is recall'd perhaps deservedly: if a little Indis- 
cretion arising from too much vivacity be a fault, my L d is 
undeniably blameable; but I doubt not but my L d Grandison 
himself will find more to be pleas'd with in y e one than to correct 
in y e other respect. I have received so many Civilities from M r 
Waddel, who does me y e hon r to be y e bearer of this, y* I should 
not do him justice to omitt letting you know how much I am 
obliged to him. I hope y 6 Family is well: Lyttelton prevented 
you in y e account of his own Madness. Sure there never was 
so much fine sense & Extravagance of Passion jumbled together 
in any one Man. Send him over to Holland: perhaps living in 
a republick may inspire him with a love of liberty & make him 
scorn his Chains. My love to all, who (a second time) I hope 
are well: & believe me with all respect & affection 

Y r most Dutiful Son 

Wm. Pitt. 

The third contains, perhaps, the only token of kindness 
between the two brothers which survives. It also alludes 
to Lyttelton's passion for Harriot. 

William Pitt to his Mother, 'in Pall Mall, London.' 

Utrecht April y e 8 th N.S. 1728. 
Hon ed Mad m , — Y r letters must always give me so much 
pleasure, y* I beg no consideration may induce you to deprive 
me of it. they can never fail being an entertainment to me 
when they give me an opportunity of hearing you are well. I 
can not omitt thanking you for y e enquiry you make about my 
supplies from my Brother: neither should I do him justice, if 
I did not assure you I receiv'd y e kindest letter in y e world from 
him: wherein he gives me y e offer of going where I think most 
for my improvement, and assures me nothing y* y e estate can 
afford shall be denied me for my advantage & education. I hope 
all y e family is well. Miss Anne's time is so taken up with 
dansing & Italien y* I despair of hearing from her. I should 
be glad to hear what conquests miss Harriot made at y e birth- 
day, if I had not a letter from one of y e Three, I must think 

39 



LORD CHATHAM 

they have forgott me. I am in pain for poor Lyttelton: I wish 
there was leagues of sea between him & y e Charms of Miss Har- 
riot. If he dies I shall sue her for y e murder of my Friend. This 
Place affords so little matter of entertainment, y* I shall only 
beg you to believe me with all respect, 

Hon ed Mad m , Y r most Dutifull Son 

Wm. Pitt. 
My love & service to my Brother & Compliments to all y e 
Family. 

His stay at Utrecht was probably not protracted, as we 
find no more letters from thence. The next glimpse we 
have of him is in January 1730, at Boconnoc. He is now 
established at home, rather, perhaps, from economy than 
of his own free will, for he disrespectfully calls Boconnoc 
' this cursed hiding-place ' ; living in Cornwall or at Swal- 
lowfield, near Reading, another of the family residences; 
or on military duty at - North 'ton,' evidently Northampton, 
which William, however, abbreviates differently in later 
letters. When we consider the elaborate style and formu- 
las of the letters of this period there seems nothing so 
strange as the passion for abbreviation by apostrophe, such 
as 'do's' for 'does,' which seems to save neither time, 
trouble, nor space. 

In February 1731 he received a commission in the 
1 st Dragoon Guards, then under the command of Lord 
Pembroke, and we find him in country quarters at North- 
ampton and elsewhere. In the autumn we find him once 
more at Boconnoc, whence he writes this more genial note 
to his mother. 

William Pitt to his Mother, at Bath. 

Bocconnock Oct br y e 1 7 1 73 1 . 
Dear Madam, — I am, after a long Confinement at Quarters, 
at present confined here, by disagreeable, dirty weather, which 

40 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

makes us all prisoners in this little house. I knew nothing of 
your journey to Bath, when I came to Town, and was therefore 
disappointed of the pleasure of seeing you there. I see you have 
put a bill upon your door. Pray what do you intend to do with 
yourself this winter ? I shou'd be mighty glad to know whether 
your affairs are near an Issue. I hope they will very soon leave 
you at Leisure to consult nothing but your health and Quiet. 
Be pleas'd to favour me with a Letter here, where I shall stay 
about a month longer; and give me the satisfaction of knowing 
how much you profit by the Waters. Believe me, 

Dear Madam, Your dutifull affec* son 

Wm. Pitt. 
My service to the Col: and Mrs. Bouchier: I shall Be glad to 
hear he makes one at the Balls. 

In 1733 he set out on a foreign tour, of which we shall 
see more presently, and before leaving writes this note, 
which gives some ground for thinking that his brother 
helped him at least to meet the expenses of this voyage, as 
Lord Camelford thinks was actually the case. 

William Pitt to his Mother, 'in Bateman Street, 
near Piccadilly, London.' 

Boconnock jan: 19 : 1732/3. 

Dear Madam, — I hope Miss Kitty who is now upon y e Road 
will get safe to You : I cant omit doing Justice To your goodness 
in making room for her, she no doubt wanting your care very 
much in the ill state she is in. I continue still here and shall 
not set out yet this month, haveing a design to go abroad then. 
It is however uncertain till I hear from my Brother after he gets 
to Town. Miss Harriot, by her letters, Is much recovered and 
I natter myself your house will prove as lucky to Poor Kitty. 
I need not assure you of my wishes for your health and speedy 
deliverance from the Misery of Late : my Love to my Sisters and 
believe me Dear Madam Your most Dutifull Son 

Wm. Pitt. 

Miss Nanny gives her Duty to you. 

41 



LORD CHATHAM 

He visited Paris, and Geneva, Besancon (where he lost 
his heart for a time), Marseilles, and Montpelier, passing 
the winter at Luneville. 

From Paris he again writes to his mother this letter, of 
no significance except dutiful affection; and another from 
Geneva which gives a strong proof of filial obedience in 
giving his consent, though with strong and obvious re- 
luctance, to one of the bills filed by his mother and Lord 
Grandison in reference to his father's succession. 

William Pitt to his Mother, 'in Bateman Street 
Near Piccadilly a Londres.' 

Paris May y e 1 1733. 
Dear Madam, — Though I have nothing to say to you yet 
of the Place I am arrived at, I cant help giving you a bare account 
of my being got safe to Paris: You are pleased to give me so 
much reason to Think you interest yourself in my welfare That 
I cou'd not acquit myself of my Duty In not giving you this 
mark of my respect and the sense I have of your goodness. I 
shall make my stay as short here as possible, let me have the 
pleasure of hearing some account of your health and situation: 
be pleased to direct to me Chez Monsieur Alexandre Banquier, 
dans la Rue St. Appoline pres de la Porte St. Denis, a Paris. I am 

Madam Y r most Dutifull Son 

Wm. Pitt. 

William Pitt to his Mother, 'in Bateman Street 
Piccadilly London. Angleterre.' 

Geneva Sep r y e 17: N.S. 1733. 
Dear Madam, — I have just rec d y e favour of your letter of 
y e 7 th august, with the answer to a bill of complaint of my L d 
Grandison and your self: I cou'd wish you had pleased to have 
let me know in general that that bill is, for at present I have no 
Idea of it. You assure me, Madam the answer you wou'd have 
me make is a form, and can lead me into no farther consequences, 
by engageing me In Law, or disobligeing My Brother; neither of 

42 



tiLS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

which I am persuaded you wou'd upon any consideration involve 
me in: upon these grounds I readily send you my consent to the 
answer proposed By M r Martyn in your letter. I am sorry it 
did not come to my hands sooner, least my answer shou'd not 
be time enough; and that I shou'd, by that means, be any in- 
voluntary obstacle to your affairs which wou'd be a sensible 
concern to Dear Madam Y r most Dutyfull affec e Son 

Wm. Pitt. 

I leave this Place shortly not knowing yet where I shall pass 
y e winter. 

In 1734 he was back in England, doing duty with his 
regiment at Newbury. 

It is unnecessary to speculate on the measure of success 
that William would have achieved in the army had he 
remained a soldier. That he had an early disposition to 
the career of arms seems probable, as his uncle, Lord Stan- 
hope, a soldier himself, who died when William was twelve, 
used to call him 'the young Marshal.' It is useless to sur- 
mise ; but had he not been so great an orator, one would 
be apt to imagine that his bent and talent lay in the direc- 
tion of a military career. This at least is certain, that he 
sedulously employed his time, preserved from mess de- 
bauches and idle activity by his guardian demon the gout. 
He told Shelburne that during the time he was a cornet 
of horse, there was not a military book that he had not 
read through. This is a large statement, but denotes at 
least unstinted application. So his career as a subaltern, 
though abruptly cut short, was probably fruitful, and 
these studies must have been useful to the future war 
minister. To paraphrase Gibbon's pompous and comical 
phrase, the cornet of dragoons may not have been useless 
to the history-maker of the British Empire. For his destiny 
was to plan and not to conduct campaigns, and he was now to 
be caught in the jealous embrace of parliamentary politics. 

43 



LORD CHATHAM 



CHAPTER III 

BUT before he launches on that troubled career, it is 
well to catch what glimpses we can obtain of Pitt 
in private life. It is the more necessary as this aspect soon 
disappears from sight, and his letters begin to assume that 
pompous and obsequious tone which we have come to be- 
lieve was his natural style, but which it is obvious was 
assumed and affected for purposes of his own. Until he 
passes on to the stage, he is as bright, as lively, and as affec- 
tionate as any lad of his generation. It is beyond measure 
refreshing to see him at this period bantering, falling in 
love, the participator of revels if not a reveller himself. 
For afterwards no one saw him behind the scenes, no one 
was admitted to his presence until every feature had been 
composed and his wig and his vesture dramatically arranged. 
To catch a glimpse of him before he played a part has been 
hitherto an unknown luxury. But to do this we must' now 
for a moment consider his sisters. 

There were five of these, and among them was to be 
found in abundance the strain of violence and eccentricity 
that distinguished the Pitts. 

'The eldest, Harriot,' writes Lord Camelford, 'was one 
of the most beautiful women of her time, but little pro- 
duced in the great world, and died very young from anxiety 
of mind in consequence of a foolish engagement she entered 
into with Mr. Corbett, son of Sir William Corbett, to whom 
she was privately married.' She secured for a while, as we 
have seen, Lyttelton's transient affections. 'The second 

44 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

daughter, Catherine, had much goodness, but neither 
beauty nor wit to boast of. She married Robert Nedham, 1 
a man of uncommon endowments, but of good Irish family 
and property, by whom she had several children.' The 
third was Ann, of whom more presently; and the fifth Mary. 
The fourth was Betty, of whom, unlike three of her 
sisters, we seem to know too much. The curse of the Pitt 
blood was strong in her. Lord Camelford, her nephew, 
speaks of her 'diabolical disposition,' and says concisely 
that ' she had the face of an angel and the heart of all the 
furies,' and that she ' formed the most complicated character 
of vice that I have ever met with.' Family testimony is 
not always the most charitable, but outside witnesses in no 
way mitigate these expressions. Lord Shelburne says that 
she was received nowhere, owing to her profligate life. 
Horace Walpole brings an infamous charge against her, 
which we may well hope is a distortion of the natural fact 
that for some time she took up her abode with her eldest 
brother Thomas, though Thomas on parting with her said 
that her staying with him was extremely distasteful to him. 
She, in any case, openly lived as his mistress with Lord 
Talbot, a peer as eccentric as herself, and who promised her 
marriage, she said, whenever he should be free from the in- 
cumbrance of Lady Talbot. 2 Afterwards she went to Italy, 
became a Roman Catholic, started from Florence with the 
declared intention of marrying Mr. Preston, a Leghorn mer- 
chant, who seems however to have been unequal to the 
occasion. 3 Then she returned to England, virulent against 
her brother William, 'whose kindness to her,' says Horace 
Walpole, no biassed witness, ' has been excessive. She ap- 
plies to all his enemies, and, as Mr. Fox told me, has even 

1 Always spelt Needham in the peerage books, always Nedham by the 
family and those concerned. 

2 'Villiers Pitt' to William Pitt. 'Tours, June i, i7S 2 -' Chatham MSS. 
3 Mann and Manners at the Court of Florence, i. 382. 

45 



LORD CHATHAM 

gone so far as to send a bundle of his letters to the author 
of The Test * to prove that Mr. Pitt has cheated her, as she 
calls it, out of a hundred a year, and which only prove that 
he once allowed her two, and, after all her wickedness, still 
allows her one. ' 2 And yet on occasion she could call William 
the best of brothers and of men. 3 This, too, was character- 
istic of the breed. 

At this period of her life she called herself, heaven knows 
why, Clara Villiers Pitt, or Villiers Clara Pitt (there is an 
engraving of her with the latter designation), and published 
a pamphlet recommending magazines of corn. Of her per- 
haps too much has been said ; but it is necessary to demon- 
strate that William's family relations were not always easy : 
Thomas reviled him, Elizabeth reviled him, Ann, whoever 
was in fault, caused him much trouble, while Thomas's son, 
whom he peculiarly cherished, regarded him with peculiar 
animosity. 

It should be mentioned, however, that Dutens met her 
in France some time during Pitt's paymastership, and gives 
us a picture of her, which also throws light on William's 
strong family affection. She was then handsome, with a 
fine figure, her face aflame with pride and intellect, her age 
apparently under thirty; she was abroad for her health. 
With her, as a companion, chosen by her brother, was a 
Miss Taylor, a much prettier girl, of whom Elizabeth was 
vigilantly jealous and with whom Dutens fell haplessly in 
love. Miss Pitt was then apparently on excellent terms 
with her illustrious brother, and gave Dutens a letter to him. 
She had indeed become enamoured of the young French- 

1 'The Test' was a weekly paper published in 1756-7, written principally 
by Arthur Murphy, and inspired by Henry Fox, as may be seen from his 
letters. See too Orford, ii. 276, and Walpole to Mann, Jan. 6, 1757. There 
had been a previous 'Test' in 1756, of which there was published only one 
number, written by Charles Townshend. See Orford ii. 218. 

2 Walpole to Mann, Jan. 17, 1757. 

3 To William Pitt, Oct. 10, 1751. Chatham MSS. 

46 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

man, a passion which, we are not surprised to hear, she car- 
ried to indecorous lengths. He, however, escaped to Eng- 
land and presented his letter. Pitt called on him the same 
afternoon and thanked him for his attentions to a beloved 
sister. Dutens became intimate, showed the minister his 
compositions, and was favoured with an inspection of Pitt's. 
Then all suddenly changed, and he was denied access. 1 
Betty had quarrelled with the family of Dutens, and had 
written to beg her brother to quarrel with Dutens. 2 Du- 
tens, she said, had boasted in company that he was well with 
her, and that if her fortune and family answered expecta- 
tion he might marry her. Consequently she desired her 
brother to order his footman to kick Dutens down stairs; 
in any case she implored him to quarrel with the young man. 
With this request Pitt unhesitatingly and unreasonably 
complied. We see here in one incident how warm were 
Pitt's family affections, and the difficulties under which 
they were cherished. 

In 1 76 1 she married John Hannan of the Middle Temple, 
' of Sir William Hannan 's family in Dorsetshire, a lawyer by 
profession, remarkable for his abilities, some years younger 
than myself, and possessed of a fortune superior to my 
own,' as Betty describes him in a hostile announcement of 
the engagement addressed to William. Nine years after- 
wards she died. Of Hannan, her husband, nothing further 
seems to be known ; but it may be surmised that his lot was 
not enviable. 

Mary, the youngest, seems to have been a spinster of no 
striking qualities. We know little of her, except that she 
was born in 1725 and died in 1782. 3 There exists one letter 
from William to her of the year 1753, and he mentions her 

1 Dutens' M^moires d'un Voyageur qui se repose, i. 31-42. 

*Tours, June 11, 1752. Villiers Pitt to W. Pitt. Chatham MSS. 

' Or 1787? as says a note in the Delany Memoirs, iv. 266. It matters little. 

47 



LORD CHATHAM 

in a letter, dated April 9, 1755, as living with him. And 
indeed he was always kind to her, as she seems to have 
habitually resided with him. Mrs. Montagu writes in July 
1754: ' Miss Mary Pitt, youngest sister of Mr. Pitt, is come 
to stay a few days with me. She is a very sensible, modest, 
pretty sort of young woman, and as Mr. Pitt seem'd to 
take every civility shown to her as a favour, I thought this 
mark of respect to her one manner of returning my obliga- 
tions to him. ' x But even she, though colourless, seems not 
to have been wholly devoid of the Pitt temperament, though 
she seems to have always been on intimate terms with her 
family. ' She had, ' says Lord Camelford, ' neither the beau- 
ty of two of her sisters, nor the wit and talents of her sister 
Ann, nor the diabolical dispositions of her sister Betty. 
She meant always, I believe, to do right to the best of her 
judgement, but that judgement was liable to be warped by 
prejudice, and by a peculiar twist in her understanding 
which made it very dangerous to have transactions with 
her.' The 'peculiar twist,' which even Mary could not 
escape, was innate in most Pitts. 

We have kept Ann to the last, though she was third of 
the sisterhood in point of age, being born in 17 12, and so 
four years younger than William, whose peculiar pet and 
crony she was for the earlier part of their lives. She was in 
her way almost as notable as he, and she resembled him 
in genius and temper, as Horace Walpole wittily observed, 
' comme deux gouttes de feu. ' But drops of fire, did they exist, 
would probably not amalgamate for long, and one would 
guess that Ann and William were too much alike to remain 
in permanent harmony. Perhaps, too, their extreme intimacy 
made them too well acquainted with each other's tender 
points, a dangerous knowledge when coupled with great 

1 Climenson's 'Elizabeth Montagu,' ii. 53. See to Mrs. Montagu's Letters, 
vol. iii. 

48 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

powers of sarcasm. One might surmise, too, that Pitt's 
wife, always apparently cold to Ann, might be disinclined 
to encourage the renewal of an intimacy which might once 
more attract William's closest confidence, though we have a 
letter 1 from Ann, dated 1757, in which she speaks with 
nothing less than rapture of Lady Hester's kindness to her. 
Lady Hester's immaculate caligraphy and frigid style give 
in our easier days an impression of distance and austerity. 

Ann, when she was little more than twenty, may be 
said to have entered public life by becoming a maid of 
honour to Queen Caroline, the wife of George II. From 
this moment she became one of that group of distinguished 
women, not blue but brilliant, who adorned England in 
the eighteenth century by their idiosyncrasies as much as 
by their abilities. She was courted and beloved by char- 
acters so famous as Gay's Duchess of Queensberry and 
George the Second's Lady Suffolk, and by Mrs. Montagu, 
who was much more blue than brilliant ; for her essay on 
Shakespeare, so much lauded by her contemporaries, has 
long been dead and buried. In her dear Mrs. Pitt's con- 
versation, declared this paragon of pedants, she saw Mi- 
nerva without the formal owl on her helmet. 

Among men she corresponded with her neighbour, 
Horace Walpole (who felt for her an affection tempered 
with alarm), Lord Chesterfield, and Lord Mansfield. 'She 
had charms enough to kindle a passion in the celebrated 
Lord Lyttelton,' says Camelford; Dr. Ayscough, a coarse 
and crafty ecclesiastic, whose acquaintance Pitt and Lyt- 
telton had made at Oxford, and who was a trusted adviser 
of Frederick, Prince of Wales, sought her in marriage ; 2 but 
there seem no other traces of the tender passion in her life. 
For the whim, if it indeed were not a joke, which made her 

1 Suffolk Letters, ii. 233. 

2 Camelford MS. Cf., too, William's letter of Sept. 29, 1730. 

49 



LORD CHATHAM 

ask Lady Suffolk to assist her to secure the hand of Lord 
Bath (then about seventy, when she herself was forty-six), 
hardly comes under that description. Ann was, indeed, 
made rather for admiration than for love. Bolingbroke, 
who called William ' Sublimity Pitt, ' called Ann ' Divinity 
Pitt.' * But she was, one may gather, destitute of beauty, 2 
and her vigorous originality of character and conversation 
inspired, we suspect, more awe than affection. The de- 
lightful sprightliness of youth is apt with age or encourage- 
ment to sour into a blistering insolence, and Ann had all 
the sarcastic powers of her brother. For example, Ches- 
terfield calling on her in his later life complained of decay. 
'I fear,' he said, 'that I am growing an old woman.' 'I 
am glad of it, ' briskly replied Ann, ' I was afraid you were 
growing an old man, which you know is a much worse 
thing. ' 3 An attractive, even fascinating, member of society, 
she was something too formidable for the ordinary man to 
take to his bosom and his hearth. Reviewing her life, we 
think that the real and sole object of her love was her 
brother William, even when her love for the moment vented 
itself, as love sometimes does, in quarrel. Strife was neces- 
sary to the Pitts, and when they waged war with each other 
it was no battle of roses. The disputes of lovers and rel- 
atives, like amicable lawsuits, are apt to become serious 
affairs, and with this race they were conflicts of the toma- 
hawk. Be that as it may, and whatever the cause, William 
and Ann adored each other, kept house together, and then 
quarrelled with prodigious violence and effect. At present 
we are not near that point. Ann is her brother's 'little 
Nan, ' ' little Jug, ' and he is writing her the delightful letters 

1 Thackeray, i. 158 note. 

2 There is a crayon portrait of her at Boconnoc, which the writer has not 
seen. It 'represents the strong contemplative face of a woman well past her 
first prime,' and was taken, apparently, in 1765. 

3 Seward's Anecdotes, ii. 355. 

50 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

contained in this chapter, written, says Camelford, who 
preserved them, with the passion of a lover rather than that 
of a brother. To us they represent rather the special rela- 
tion of a brother and sister, when affection and intimacy 
have grown with their growth, from the nursery and the 
schoolroom to riper years, not unfrequently the sweetest 
and tenderest of human connections. Our only regret 
must be that William did not cherish Ann's letters as she 
did his, for they may well have possessed her peculiar charm. 
'She equalled her brother, Lord Chatham,' writes her 
nephew, who knew them both well, ' in quickness of parts, 
and exceeded him in wit and in all those nameless graces and 
attentions by which conversation is enlivened and en- 
deared.' At the same time, one may reluctantly admit 
that such letters of hers as survive give one little desire for 
more. The same, however, may be said of her great broth- 
er's habitual epistles (for they can be called nothing else) ; 
and their correspondence together was something apart, the 
gay and engaging eclogue of two young hearts; so that 
Ann, like William, must have been at her best in her early 
letters to him. 

And so we set forth these delightful letters of a lad of 
twenty-two to his favourite sister. They need no com- 
ment ; of the allusions no explanation can now be given or 
would be worth giving; but the letters speak for them- 
selves. 1 

Boconnock, Jan v 3, 1730. 

Dear Nanny, — As you have degraded my sheets From- y e 
rank and Quality of a Letter, merely for Containing a few Inno- 
cent Questions, I am determin'd to avoid such rigour for the 
future by Confining myself to bare narration: first, Then we 
are to have a ball this week at Mr. Hawky's Child-feast, (a 

1 All these letters from William to Ann Pitt come from the papers at Drop- 
more, unless where noted otherwise. 

51 



LORD CHATHAM 

Heathenish Name for the Christian Institution of Baptism), 
where the Ladies intend to shine most irresistably, and like 
enfants perdus, thrust themselves in the very front of y e Battle, 
break some stubborn Tramontanne Hearts, or Die of the spleen 
upon the spot. The next thing I have to say, (Don't be afraid 
of a Question) Is, that we set out y e end of the same week, and 
propose seeing you about a week after our departure. II say 
no more, least I should forget y e restrictions I have Laid myself 
under and launch out into some Impious enquiries that don't 
suit my sex. Adieu, Dearest Nanny, till I have the pleasure of 
seeing you at Bath. 1 

The next letter is from Swallowfield, one of the Pitt 
houses. Ayscough has proposed to Ann. He is a favourite 
butt of William's, who seems to rejoice in his discomfiture. 

Swallowfeild, Sep. y e 2g th , 1730. 
I am quite tired of waiting for a letter from my Dear Nanny, 
and am determin'd by way of revenge to fatigue you as much 
by obliging you to read a very long letter from myself, as you 
have me with the eager expectation of receiving one from you. 
The excuse you assign 'd for not doing it sooner fills me with 
apprehensions for your health; Is it that you still converse 
only with Doctor Bave, 2 or that you have already changed the 
old Physician for the young Galant? Is it the want of conver- 
sation That denies you matter, or the entire engagement to it 
that won't allow you time for a letter? Be it as it will, I flatter 
myself into a beleif of the Latter, chusing rather to be very 
angry with you for your neglect of me, than sincerely afflicted 
for your want of health. I desire I may know from yourself 
what advances you make towards your recovery; you never 
can want a subject to write to me upon, while you have it in 
your power to entertain me with a prospect of seeing you per- 
fectly restored to health, and in consequence of that to the 
sprightly exertion of your understanding and full display (as my 

1 'To Mrs. Ann Pitt, at Mrs. Phillips's, at Bath. T. Pitt Free.' 

2 Dr. Charles Bave, a physician of the highest character at Bath See 
note on Vol. I., p. 408 of Lady Suffolk's Letters. 

52 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

Lady Lynn elegantly has it) of your Primitive Beauties. Why 
shou'd I mention Ayscough's overthrow! That is a conquest 
perhaps of a nature not so brilliant as to touch your heart with 
much exultation; But lett me tell you, a man of his wit in one's 
suite has no 111 air ; You may hear enough of eyes and flames and 
such gentle flows of tender nonsense from every Fop that can 
remember, but I can assure you Child, a man can think that 
declares his Passion by saying Tis not a sett of Features I ad- 
mire, &c. Such a Lover is the Ridiculous Skew, 1 who Instead 
of whispering his soft Tale to the woods and lonely Rocks, pro- 
claims to all the world he loves Miss Nanny — Fath (sic) — with 
the same confidence He wou'd pronounce an Heretical Sermon 
at St. Mary's. I must quit your admirer to enquire after the 
condition of the Colonel and his Lady, 2 and to assure 'em of my 
most hearty wishes for Their health and happiness. I beg leave 
to repeat the same to Miss Lenard, who I hope will recruit her 
spirits after so much affliction with y e holsome Application of a 
Fiddle. I shall communicate to you next Post a Translation of 
an Elegy of Tibullus By Lyttelton, who orders me to say it was 
done for you : 3 I shall then be able to say whether I go to Corn- 
wall or no, so that you may know how to direct to me. 

I need not say what you are to do with the hair enclosed to 
you from Mrs. Pitt. Adieu dear Nanny. 

The next letter is from Blandford, where the writer is 
stopping on his way to Boconnoc, which he gives as his 
address at the end of the letter. He is still occupied with 
his sister's career as a flirt. 

Blanford: Oct. y e 13 th . 1730. 
As we mutually complain 'd of the silence of Each other, so 
I conclude we mutually have Forgiven it: But had I continued 
it, my Dear, Till I had something more entertaining to talk of 
Than an execrable journey to Cornwall, perhaps You might not 
have had much reason to complain of me. I have not had a 

1 This must almost certainly be Ayscough, in spite of ' Skew's being the 
hereditary nickname of the Fortescue family. 

2 These are probably Colonel and Mrs. Lanoe, with whom Ann appears to be 
staying at Bath. 3 Lyttelton's Misc. Works, 619. 

5 53 



LORD CHATHAM 

minute's pleasure from my own thoughts since I left Swallow- 
feild, till now I give them up entirely to you, and Paint you to 
myself in the hands of some agreeable Partner, as happy as the 
new way of wooing can make you. I can not help suggesting 
To you here a little grave advice, which is, not to lett your glo- 
rious Thirst of Conquest transport You so far, as to lose your 
health in acquiring Hearts : I know I am a bold man to dissuade 
One from dansing a great deal that danses very gracefully; but 
once more I repeat, beware of shining too much ; content yourself 
to be healthy first, even tho you suspend your triumphs a week 
or ten days. I beg I may not be misconstrued To insinuate any- 
thing here in favour of my own sex, or to serve the sinister ends 
of an envious Sister or two ; no ; I scorn such mean artifices. In 
God's Name, when the waters have had their Effect, give no 
Quarter, faites main basse upon all you meet, a coup d 'even telle, 
a coup d'Oeil: spare neither age nor condition: but like an 
Unskilfull Generall don't begin to take the Feild till your military 
stores are provided and your magazines well furnish'd. Thus 
Have I acquitted myself not only as an able but honest Coun- 
sellour, and ventured to represent to you your true Interest, 
tho' never so distastefull. Adieu, my Dear Nanny, till you renew 
our Conversation by a speedy letter. My sincere respects to the 
Col. and family. 

Boconnock Near Bodmin. 

Next comes the letter in which he curses Boconnoc, 

but only because of its remoteness. He lives, it may be 

presumed, at the family house from economy. But he is 

not at ease about Ann's health, and longs to be at Bath 

to be with her. 

Boconnock. Nov r y e i$ th 1730. 

I read all my Dear Nanny's letters with so much pleasure, 
that I grow more and more out of temper with y e remoteness of 
this cursed hiding place, where The distance of some hundred 
Miles denies me the Repetition of it so often as I eagerly desire. 
But as much as I am pleas 'd with the prettiness of your style 
and manner of writing, I cant help feeling a sensible uneasiness 
to hear no news of your amendment; cou'd my Dear Girl add 

54 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

that to them, they wou'd give me a satisfaction that wou'd bear 
some proportion to The degree of your Esteem, you convince me 
I possess. We are all sollicitous to hear Doctor Baves opinion of 
your case, which I beg you will not fail to send me in your next 
letter. You will before this reaches you, have rec d a letter from 
my Brother, which I hope will give you perfect satisfaction with 
regard to your further demands. As I shall not go to London 
Before my Brother, it will not be absolutely in my Power to see 
you in my way: I am not however without hopes of prevailing 
upon him to go from Blanford to Bath, which is not above thirty 
Miles. Beleive me I shall have it at heart to make you this visit, 
having two such powerful motives to it, as my Own Pleasure and 
yours. All proofs of your affection To me are highly agreeable, 
and I am willing to measure the value you may set upon mine to 
you, By the same favourable standard. Be assured therefore I 
shall lett slip no occasion of giving what I shall in my turn receive 
with infinite pleasure : Pray assure Colonel Lanoe and his family 
of my good wishes; and let us know what benefit they receive 
from the waters. I have time for no more. Adieu My Dear 
Girl. 1 

He was now apparently with his regiment at North- 
ampton, though he was not gazetted till February. 

Northton. Jan. 7, 1731, 

I am just in my Dear Nanny's Condition, when she tells me 
she sat down determin'd to write tho' she had Nothing to say: 
but I know not how it comes to pass, One has a pleasure in saying 
and hearing very nothings, where one loves: while I have my 
paper before me I Fancy myself in company with you, and while 
you read my letters, you hear me chattering to you. tis at least 
an interruption to working or reading, that serves to diversify 
Things a little, to be forced to run your eyes over a side or Two 
of paper; tho' it says nothing at all. I remember, when I saw 
you la'st, you had a thought of reading and Translating Voiture's 
letters : I beg you will take him up as soon as you have got through 
this of mine, To recompense you for the dullest of Letters, what 

1 'Mrs. Ann Pitt, at Col. Lanoe's at Bath.' 

55 



LORD CHATHAM 

will you Have me do? I come from two hours muzzy conversa- 
tion To a house full of swearing Butchers and Drunken Butter 
women, and in short all the blessings of a market day: In such 
a situation what can the wit of man suggest to him? Oh for the 
restless Tongue of Dear little Jug ! She never knows the painful 
state of Silence In the midst of uproar: for my Part I think I 
cou'd write a better letter in a storm at sea, or in my own way, 
at a Bombardment, than in my present situation. I won't have 
this called a Conversation: it shall pass for a mute interview, 
adieu my Dearest Nanny : preserve your health is y e only word of 
consequence I can say to-night. 

Compliments to my Sis. Pitt, and all my Friends that come 
in your way. 1 

Now, for the only time in his life perhaps, we find him 
engaged reluctantly in drinking bouts, the necessary disci- 
pline of a military mess in those days. He refers to the 
amiability of Charles Feilding in a later letter. 

Northton. Feb ry : y e g. 1731. 

I have been a monstrous time out of my Dearest Nanny's 
Company ; the date of your Letter before me, Me fait de sanglantes 
reproches : I say nothing in my own behalf, but Frankly confess, 
in aggravation of my silence, that I have neglected you for a 
course of drunken conversation, which I have some days been in. 
The service wou'd be the most inactive life in y e world if Charles 
Feilding was out of it ; As long as he is with us, we seldom remain 
long without pretty smart Action: I am just releiv'd by one 
night's rest, from an attaque that lasted sixteen hours, but as a 
Heroe should never boast, I have done y e state, some service and 
they know't — no more of that. 

What shall I talk of to my dear Girl? I have told her I love 
Her, in every shape I cou'd think of: we'l converse in French 
and tell one another y e same things under the Dress of Novelty. 
Mon aimable Fille, rien ne m'est si doux que de recevoir de votre 
part les marques d'une ardente amitie, si ce n'est de vous en 
donner moi-meme. I did not think I cou'd have wrote a sentence 

1 'To Mrs. Ann Pitt jun. at Boconnock near Bodmin Cornwall.' 

56 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

so easily, mais les paroles obeissent toujours aux sentiments du 
coeur. Let me tell you once more, in plain English, your letter 
was infinitely pretty; you may leave off Voiture whenever you 
please. I hope little Jug is still talking at Boconnock; how Fares 
it with my Statira, my angry Dear? I can think of nothing so 
likely to bring her into Temper, as telling Her, her Skew will 
soon revisit y e groves of Boconnock, where they may pass y e 
Long Day, and tend a few sheep together. I beg she'l accept 
of y e following stanza I met with by chance in some french poesy, 
and put a Tune to it, which She may warble in honour of her 
gentle loveing shepherd: 

Dans ces Lieux solitaires 
Daphnis est de retour: 
Deesse de Cythere 
Celebre ce grand jour: 
Rapellez sur ces rives 
Les amours en voles, 
Les graces fugitives 
et les Ris exiles.' 

my Love and services to all Freinds: My Brother gives me y e 
pleasure of hearing my Sist r Pitt is very well: pray make my 
apologies for not writing to her. 

Adio Anima mia bella, 
Dolce speranza mia. 

W M Pitt. 

He has now come to London apparently to kiss hands 
for his commission. How little George II. can have real- 
ised what his relations were to be with the raw young 
cornet. 

London: March y 5: 1731. 

I thank my Dearest Nanny for her Letter Though it abused 
me, I think without Reasonable Grounds: tis true I dont write 
so often as I wish to see you, yet I won't allow I have let our 
conversation suffer any considerable Interruption. I Have had 
no opportunity yet of cultivating any farther acquaintance with 
M r Molinox than by receiving his name and leaving Mine : I shall 

57 



LORD CHATHAM 

need no other inducement to his Freindship than the presumption 
of his civility to you, which your letter gives me reason to think : 
I shall ever esteem Any Man deserving of my regard who loves 
In any degree what so thoroughly merits and possesses my Heart 
as my Dear Girl. I have the pleasure of telling you my Com- 
mission is sign'd and I have Kiss'd hands for it, so that my 
Country Quarters won't be Cornwall this Summer. You are like 
to have Company soon with you, Hollins having ordered my 
Sister Pitt the Bath immediately: what becomes of the two poor 
vestals I dont yet know, the Town produces nothing new, as the 
Place you are in I suppose, produces absolutely nothing at all: 
kill some of your time by writing often to one who will always 
contribute to make you pass it more pleasurably, when in his 
Power. Adieu, recover y r health, and preserve Chearfulness 
enough to give your Understanding a fair light. 1 

Y rs most sensibly 

W. Pitt. 

The next letter was written in the midst of what would 
now be called a bear-fight, carried on apparently in the 
room of the demure Lyttelton. 

London. March y e 13: 173 1. 
I am now lock'd into George's room ; the girls Thundering at 
the door as if Heaven and Earth would come together : I am 
certainly the warmest Brother, or the coldest Gallant In the 
Universe, to suffer the gentle Impertinencies the sportly Sollic- 
itations of two girls not quite despicable without emotion, and 
bestow my Time and spirits upon a Sister: But in effect the 
thing is not so strange or unreasonable, for every Man may have 
Girls worthy his attention, but few, sisters so conversible as my 
Dear Nanny. Tis impossible to say much, amidst this rocking 
of the doors Chairs and tables : I fancy myself in a storm Of the 
utmost danger and horror; and were I really in one, I would not 
cease to think of my Dear Girl, till I lost my fears and Trepidations 
in the object of my tenderest care and sincerest zeal, let the 
winds roar, and the big Torrent burst ! I won't leave my Nanny 

1 'To Mrs. Ann Pitt at Mrs. Phillips's at Bath. T. Pitt Free.' 

58 






HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

for any Lady of you all, but with the warmest assurance of 
unalterable affection, Adieu. 1 

He is now once more in country quarters, grievously 
hipped. The allusion to the barmaid 'who young at the 
bar is just learning to score' reads like a line from some 
forgotten song. In his despair he threatens to get drunk. 

Northampton April y e g ih - 1731. 
After neglecting my Dear Girl so many Posts In the joys of 
London, I should be deservedly Punished by the Loss of your 
correspondence now I very much stand in need of it: I am 
come from an agreeable set of acquaintance in Town to a Place, 
where the wings of Gallantry must Be terribly clip'd, and can 
hope to soar No higher than to Dolly, who young at the Bar is 
just Learning to score — what must I do? my head is not settled 
enough to study ; nor my heart light enough to find amusement 
In doing- nothing. I have in short no resource But flying to the 
conversation of my distant Freinds and supplying the Loss of 
the jolis entretiens I have left behind by telling my greifs and 
hearing myself pity'd. I shall every Post go near to waft a sigh 
from Quarters to the Bath, which you shall rally me very prettyly 
upon, suppose me in Love, laugh at my cruel fate a little, then 
bid me hope for a Fair wind and better weather. I entreat you 
Be very trifling and badine, send me witty letters or I must chear 
my heart at the expense Of my head and get drunk with bad 
Port To kill time. My sister is by this time with You and I 
hope the Girls : my Love to her and bid her send away her hus- 
band and drink away, my spirits flag, et je n'en puis plus, 
adieu. 

One would guess, but one can only guess, that the 
following letter referred to some project of marrying 
William, which Ann dreaded as causing a separation from 
her. 

Northampton. May y e 21: 1731. 

What shall I say to my Dearest Nanny for sinking into a 
tenderness below y e dignity of her spirit and Genius? I sat 

1 Same address. 

59 



LORD CHATHAM 



down with a resolution to scold you off for a little Loving Fool, 
but Find myself upon examination your very own Brother and 
as fond of receiving such testimonies of the Excess of y r affection, 
as you are of Bestowing them: t'wou'd be more becoming y e 
Firmness of a man to reprove you a little upon this occasion, and 
advise you to fortify your Mind against any such Separation as 
you so kindly apprehend, but as your fears are, I believe at 
present Groundless, I chuse rather To talk to you like an affec- 
tionate Freind, than a stern Philosopher and return every Fear 
you Feel for me with a most ardent wish for your Happiness: 
Beleive me t'will wound my Quiet to be forced to do anything to 
disturb yours, But shou'd such an event as you are alarm'd at, 
arrive, your own reason will soon convince your tender Fears, 
there is but one Party for me to take : All the Dictates of Pru- 
dence, all the Considerations of Interest must determine me to 
it: But I am Insensibly drawn in to prove I ought to do, what 
There is no appearance I shall have in my Power to do, therefore 
my Dear Girl, suspend your Inquietudes, as I will my Arguments, 
and think I Long to see you in y e full enjoyment of y r Health 
and Spirits, which I hope to be able to do early in August. 
Adieu my Dearest Nanny, Love me and preserve your own hap- 
piness. 

I never rec d a Line from my Sister Pitt. 

But will write to her soon. I hope she is well. 1 

This next letter is taken up with poking fun at Ays- 
cough. The 'poor nuns' would be Pitt's sisters, whom he 
calls elsewhere the 'poor vestals.' 2 

North' ton June y e 17: 1731. 
My Dear Nanny's letter from Bath gave me so many Pleasures 
that I don't know which to thank her for first : the Prettiness of 
it tells me she has more sense than her sex, the affection of it 
declares she is more capable of Freindship Than her sex : and to 
compleat my joy, It assures me she no longer wants her health : 
which may Heaven continue to my Dear Girl ! If anything can 
make me devout, t'is my Zeal for your happiness : However don't 
let the Parson 3 know this Prayer escaped me for fear she (sic) 

1 'To Mrs. Ann Pitt, at Bath.' 2 Ante, p. 56. » Dr. Ayscough? 

60 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

shou'd be malicious enough to Tell me of it in company some time 
or other at Quarters. I am glad he is with you: he will prove as 
good an enlivener of the spirits and invigourate the conversation 
amongst you, as much as Bath waters do The Blood. Be sure 
not to suffer him to be Indolent and withdraw his Wit from y e 
{Service of y e Company : I know y e Dog sometimes grows tired of 
being laugh't at: But no matter: insist upon his being a Man of 
humour every Day but Sunday. I expect you will all Three Lose 
your reputations in y e country for him: and indeed there's no 
Intimacy with one of His Cloath without too much room for 
Suspicion: But as you don't expect to make your fortune there, 
The thing is not so deplorable. You will be mutually Happy in 
meeting the Poor Nuns again : I very much fear I shall not par- 
take of that pleasure so soon as August : Beleive me I long for 
nothing more than to see you all well and happy : I break off y e 
Conversation with great reluctance To go to Supper: Adieu 
Dearest Nanny. 

Ann was now to be a maid of honour and venture on the 
new world of a court. So she asks advice of her sage young 
brother, and he gives his admonitions in French, probably 
from fear of the Post Office. 

Undated. 

Vous voulez que je vous dise, mon aimable, ce que je pense 
de la vie que vous aliez mener a la cour; votre Interest, qui me 
touche de pres, m'y fait faire mille Reflexions: en voici mon 
Idee. Le cour me paroit une mer peu aisee a naviger, mais qui 
ne manque pas d'ouvrir aux mariniers bien entendus le com- 
merce le plus avantageux; j'entens l'art de connoitre le monde et 
de s'en faire connoitre agreablement : Un Esprit habile sans 
artifice, et un coeur gai sans legerete vous rendent ce voiage pleins 
d'agrements et de plaisirs, pendant que la vertu qui ne se dement 
jamais, est l'Etoile fixe qui vous empeche de vous y egarer. 

En effet n'est-il pas a souhaiter pour une Personne qu'on 
aime, et dont on connoit bien les forces, de la voir exposee a un 
tel point, qu'elle ne puisse s'en tirer qu'avec le secours du bon 
sens et de la Prudence? Ce sont les difficultes qui donnent au 

61 



LORD CHATHAM 

merite tout son jour, et souvent elles en font naitre: Vous en 
avez, mon aimable, et il ne s'agit que de le mettre en oeuvre: 
mais voici ce qui vous embarasse: La Modestie, qui en est une 
Considerable, cache mille autres vertus en se montrant toujours 
elle-meme; Elle ne laisse pas en cela de faire un peu le Tyran: 
elle nous fait souvenir de ces meres qui par un excez de Pruderie 
derobent leurs Filles aux yeux du monde, toutes aimables qu' elles 
soient, mais que cette Modestie songe a prendre quelque fois le 
Parti de la retraite, et qu'elle scache qu'on ne la regrette gueres, 
quand on voit quelque belle vertu briller a sa place. 

a mon avis il n'y a rien de si outree que l'idee que de certaines 
gens se sont fait de la cour des Princes: lis ne s'y figurent que 
1' En vie et ses noirceurs, la Perfidie, et les suites funestes de 
1 'amour deregle: ils en enlaidissent tenement la ressemblance 
qu'on ne la reconnoit plus: pour vous, ma chere, le ne vous con- 
seille ni de vous troubler la cervelle d'affreuses Chimeres, ni de 
vous endormir tout a fait a 1 'ombre de la securite. Pour ce qui 
est de l'amour, il seroit ridicule d'entreprendre de vous en Tracer 
le Portrait, II ne se fera comprendre que par Luimeme: en un 
mot, qu'il soit un Dieu bienfaissant ou qu'il ne soit qu'un Demon 
malin, donnez vous garde de l'offenser, car, effectivement, c'est 
un Personnage a represailles : enfin en quelque caractere que vous 
le voyez, II vous le faudra respecter: dans l'un vous l'aimerez 
comme fidele chretienne; dans l'autre, reverez le arm qu'il ne 
vous fasse point de mal. adieu ma tres chere. 

William has now set out on his foreign tour, of which 
we caught some glimpses in letters to his mother. We 
have already had his letter to his mother from Paris. 

Paris May y e 3 rd - N.S. 1733. 

I don't know whether my Dearest Nanny is not at this mo- 
ment angry with me for not writing sooner; But cou'd you see 
the hurry this Place throws a man into upon his arrival, you wou'd 
rather wonder I write at all. I have done nothing since I came 
to Paris, but run up and down and see ; so that beleive me it is a 
sort of Novelty to set down and think : Tis with pleasure I return 
to you from The variety of fine sights which have engaged me; 

62 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

my eyes have been long enough entertain 'd, to give ray Heart 
leisure to indulge itself in a short conversation with my Dear 
Girl. It may sound oddly to say I love you best at a great dis- 
tance, but surely absence best shows us the Value of a Thing, by 
making us feel how much we want it : I find already I shall have 
many vacant hours that wou'd be agreably fill'd up with the 
company of something one esteems; but I must comfort myself 
a la francoise, Ie bannis la Sagesse et la Raison; c'est de notre 
vie le Poison. I shall set out for Besancon in franche comte In 
three or four days, where I shall stay till autumn, write often 
and direct to me chez Mons r Alexandre Banquier dans la Rue St. 
Appoline Pres de la Porte St. Denis a Paris who will Take care 
to send them to me. I hope you like your way of Life better 
every Day; I don't know whether you may not be said to be 
travelling too ; France is hardly newer to me than Court was to 
you ; may you find the Country mend upon you the farther you 
advance in it: bon voyage ma chere, and may you find at your 
journey's end as good an inn as matrimony can afford you. 
I am 

Your most aff* Brother 

W. Pitt. 

My Love to Kitty and Harriot. I cou'd not write to all and 
you are the only one I was sure to find. 

I write this Post to Skew ; if he is not in Town, enquire at his 
Lodgings for y e letter and send it. I hope my Brother rece d 
my Letter. 1 

The next letter leaves him at Besancon, the ancient 
capital of Franche-Comte, wrested from the Spaniards in 
1678, and now become a French fortress, famous for its 
silver watches. Here Pitt loses his heart. 

Besancon. June the 5: 1733. N.S. 

I receiv'd my Dear Nanny's letter yesterday: it has no Date, 

but I imagine by some of the Contents it has been a tedious time 

upon the road. The direction I left was a very proper one and 

particular enough, Alexander being generally known at Paris, 

1 'To The Hon" 1 " Mrs. Ann Pitt at St. James's House Londres.' 

63 



LORD CHATHAM 

so that the street of his abode is unnecessary : however To be very- 
sure of meeting with no disappointment In a pleasure I desire to 
indulge myself in as often as you'l let me, direct to me at Alex- 
ander's dans la rue St. Appoline pres de la Porte St. Denis a 
Paris, who will carefully transmit all letters to me, wherever I 
am. The pleasure you give me in the account of Kitty's recovery, 
is disagreably accompanied with that of Poor Harriot's Relapse 
into an ill State of Health ; which I too much fear will never be 
removed till her mind is made a little easy : I never think of her 
but with great uneasiness, my tenderness for her begins to turn 
to sorrow and affliction ; I consider her in a great degree lost, and 
buried almost in an unsuccessfull Ingagement: You have all my 
warmest wishes for your happiness and prosperity. I persuade 
myself you are in the high road to them, make the best of your 
way I beg of you ; and contrive to finish your Travels by the time 
of my return. I can say but little of Besancon yet : The Place is 
externally pretty enough how it will prove upon a more intimate 
knowledge of it, I can't say. My Lord Walgrave was so good as 
to procure me letters For the Commandant and a Lady of this 
Place who passes for the finest Woman here. I have had the 
honour to dine with her at her campagne, where I was very hand- 
somely regaled : what ressource Her acquaintance will be, I shall 
be better able to judge after another visit or two. 

Skew hinted something to me concerning Kitty, which he said 
was not quite chimerical. If it be any suite of my Mother's 
project for her I doubt the Success. I have not Heard a word 
from my Brother, tho' I have wrote to him three times. If he 
han't received them all let him know it. 

I find Sir James Gray here, who is a very pretty sort of Man 
and once more my schoolfellow; between my letters and the 
acquaintance he has made in the Town, we shall be of some Use 
to one another. Adieu. 

Your most aff* Freind and Brother 

W. Pitt. 

I wish you joy of Lord William's Match. 

He is next found at Marseilles, where he discovers that 
he is still sore from his love affair at Besancon. 

64 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

Marseilles. sep:Yi: 1733. 

j'ai honte a regarder la datte de votre derniere lettre, a 
laquelle je vai faire reponse: vous me dites ma Chere, que vous 
etes fort aise que vos lettres me f assent plaisir, d'autant plus 
que vous croiez en avoir obligation plutot a ma prevention pour 
vous, qu'a votre merite. Qu'y a-til de plus obligeant Pour moi 
ou de plus injuste pour vous meme ? 

II est vrai que je vous aime a un point qui passe bien sou vent 
dans le monde pour aveuglement : mais je pretens vous aimer en 
connoisseur, je veux que le gout et la raison f assent ici ce que 
l'entetement fait d'ordinaire ailleurs. ne guerirez vous jamais 
de cette modestie outree? de grace ne faites plus Tort a vous 
meme par une humilite qui n'est pas de ce bas lieu, et cessez de 
louer mon amitie aux depens de mon gout. 

Vous voiez par la datte de ceci que je suis a Marseilles, j'y suis 
depuis deux jours et conte d'en partir dans deux ou trois jours 
pour Monpelier, ou nous ferons un sejour a peu pres comme celui 
que nous ferons ici : je crois passer l'hiver a Luneville, et de x 
a Lyon par Geneve et le long du Rhin a Strasbourg d'ou je me 
rendrai en Lorraine, je viens de quitter Besancon avec infiniment 
de regrets: voulez vous que je me confesse a vous? j'y avois un 
plus fort attachement que je ne croiois, avant que de me Trouver 
sur le Point de partir: tant il est vrai que Ton ne sent jamais si 
bien le prix d'une chose Que lorsque il la faut perdre. Nous y 
avions de fort aimables connoissances, et je trouve presentement 
a plus de soixante Lieues de loin, que j'y aurois passer l'hyver 
volontiers, je n'en ai pas tout a, travers du coeur, mais toutefois 
j'en ai. adieu ma chere, faites moi d'abord reponse, etimputez 
mon silence passe a toute autre cause que a un refroidissement 
pour vous. je suis avec tout la tendresse du monde 

votre affectionne Serviteur 

W. Pitt. 2 

And now he has arrived at Luneville, the city of the 
moon, once dedicated to the worship of Diana, but at this 
time devoted to the manufacture of glass and pottery. In 

1 Illegible. 

2 'To The Hon ble M™ Ann Pitt at M ra Richard's In Pallmall, London. 
Angleterre.' 

65 



LORD CHATHAM 

four years it was to be enlivened by the gay court of Stan- 
islas; but it was now a provincial town, occupied pro- 
visionally by the French in defiance of its absentee Duke, 
Francis, afterwards Emperor of Germany. Pitt is not yet 
cured of his passion. It is painful to him to revive it by 
giving a description of the lady, and he seems to feel her 
want of noble birth as if he had contemplated marriage. 

Luneville ce 12: d'octob. N.S. 1733. 

Votre lettre me rejouit fort en m'apprenant que votre vie est 
heureuse: quand vous ne me manderiez que cela une fois la 
semaine, votre commerce me donneroit toute la satisfaction du 
monde: mais d'ailleurs il y'a, mon aimable, un tour agreable 
dans tout ce que vous me dites, qui me rend votre conversation 
charmante. La tendresse de ses amis, en quel que expression que 
ce soit, nous touche; mais quand elle se presente a nous d'une 
maniere aisee et delicate, 1' esprit participe a la satisfaction que 
la coeur en recoit. 

Vous me demandez le Portrait de la Belle: faites vous bien 
attention a quoi vous m'allez engager? je commence a respirer 
et vous voulez me replonger dans les douleurs que m'a causees sa 
perte, en m'obligeant de renouveller dans mon esprit les traits 
qui s'en etoient empares. L'absence est un grand Medecin: je 
me suis si bien trouve de ses remedes que je ne desespere pas d'en 
pouvoir revenir : laissez lui faire encore un peu et je vous ferai le 
Portrait, que vous me demandez, assez a l'aise. Cependant trou- 
vez bon que je vous en fasse seulement un crayon (a la hate?) 
en vous disant que, quoique son coeur fut certainement neuf, 
son esprit ne l'etoit point (j'en parle comme de feu ma Flamme) 
que sa Taille etoit grande et des plus parfaites, son air simple 
avec quelque chose de noble; Pour ses Traits je n'y touche pas: 
suffit que vous sachiez que ce fut de ces beautes d'un grand effet, 
et que sa Physionomie prononcat quelque chose des qualites 
d'une ame admirable, ne vous attendez pas pour le present 
Que je vous en donne un detail si exact que vous en puissiez la 
reconnoittre si elle se trouvoit sur votre chemin: je n'ose m'y 
laisser aller da vantage: nous en parlerons un jour plus ample- 
ment: mais avant de quitter son chapitre il faut que je vous 

66 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

dise tout : Elle n'a point de titre ni de grand nom qui impose ; et 
c'est la le diable. C'est simplement Madamoiselle de — fille 
cadette de Mons r de — ecuyer a Besancon : Religieuse, Vous avez 
bien dit que j'en parlerai volontiers: de quoi vous avisez vous de 
mettre un homme sur le chapitre de ses amours ? Vous saviez que 
quand on y est, on ne scait jamais ou finir, et que vous vous exposez 
a essuier tout ce qui vient au bout de sa plume, voila trop parler 
de mes affaires : parlons un peu des votres : faisons des demandes 
par rapport a certain peuple connu sous le titre d'amants. Parler 
franchement et donnez m'en des nouvelles. vous ne scauriez 
etre si content que vous l'etes so vous n'aviez range quelque 
coeur sous vos lois : adieu : aimons nous tou jours et songeons a 
nous render heureux. 

W. Pitt. 

No one can be more sensible than I am of the esteem of Charles 
Feilding, nor more disposed to do justice to the amiableness of 
his character. 

Six weeks afterwards all trace of his love affair has 

disappeared; it is not the mere cessation of pain, it is 

oblivion. 

Luneville. Nov. y e 22: 1733. 

Les verites obligeantes que vous me dites, ne me sont pas 
seulement cheres par le fond de tendresse qu'elles me font vous 
connoitre pour moi, elles le sont au dernier point par la maniere 
agreable dont vous les tournez: j'aime autant que votre coeur 
s'explique avec moi en bon Anglois qu'en bon francois, d'autant 
plus que ce qu'on dit en sa langue maternelle paroit encore plus 
Naturel, et c'est la ce qui fait le principal merite des lettres 
d'amitie. je suis charme, mon aimable Bonne, de l'air content 
dont vous m'ecrivez, j'ai un plaisir aussi sensible a me figurer 
que vous etes heureuse, que vous etes gaie, que j'en pourrois 
repentir moimeme de tout ce que la joie et la gaiete me pourroit 
offrir: je vous suis present que si l'etois Dans le cabinet a Cote 
de votre Toilette. Je n'ai plus rien a vous dire de Mademoiselle. 

C'etoit de ces flammes passageres, un eclair qui a passe si vite 
qu'il n'en reste pas le moindre vestige, j'ai oublie jusque au 
portrait que je vous en ai fait : n'allez pas m'accuser de legerete, 

67 



LORD CHATHAM 

voila comme il faut etre en voiage: je me fais un fond de con- 
stance pour mon retour. Souvenez vous de garder votre parole 
en me faisant la confidence de vos premieres amours: que le 
terme ne vous choque pas, je l'entends avec les circonstances 
qu'il faut. Je ne doute pas que vous ne m'en fassie y bientot, au 
moins si vous avez autant de franchise que je me l'imagine. 
adieu, ma chere, je vous — (torn) — de terribles bagatelles : mais je 
ne'en scai rien — (torn) 

Votre tres affectionne 

W. Pitt. 

If Miss Molly Lyttelton is in Town, I wish you may see one 
another often, and make a Friendship. 1 

The two following letters contain obscure allusions, 
which, so far as we can now interpret them, appear to 
indicate that Thomas Pitt at any rate was at this time a 
ministerialist and supporter of Sir Robert Walpole. 

Newbury Ocib r y e 24: 1734. 
Dear Nanny, — You may conceive I was a good deal sur- 
prised at M r Harrison's modest proposal: I thought it indeed 
so monstrous, that y e best way of treating it was not to vouch- 
safe it any answer, especially as it did not come immediately 
from Him: I cannot conceive how poor Harriot cou'd think of 
employing Herself in such a message, or at least that she wou'd 
not understand my neglect in answering it, to be (what it is) a 
thorough contempt of the Noble Colonel's ridiculous offer. My 
first astonishment is a little abated by hearing he was encouraged 
to it by my Brother at Paris, I mean my astonishment as to him ; 
For the latter, I have done wondering at any the most Inscrutable 
of his proposed designs: it must be confess'd, this last (if true) 
is not inferiour to any of the brightest passages of his conduct; 
removeing me to bring in a Person declared in Opposition, and 
who it is proposed shou'd pay me, instead of reimbursing him 
his expences at Oakhampton. I can talk no more of him; I'll 
endeavour to put him out of my mind till January. 

1 "To the Hon We Mrs Ann Pitt at St, James's House London. Angle- 
terre.' 

68 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

I am extremely pleased to see the time of my deliverance 
from my Inn approach, a month more will bring me to you, 
when I shall be as happy as the endless disapointments and 
difficulties I have to encounter, will allow me; all I have of 
happiness is confined to you and my friend George; you may 
easily judge of my Impatience to be with you; I suppose he's 
still at Stowe. I am pleased with y e honour done me to (sic) 
Lady Suffolk, the more as I am sure it gave you pleasure. 
Adieu Dear Nanny. 

Most affec y y rs 

W. Pitt. 1 

Newbury. Nov: y e 7. 1734. 
Dear Nanny, — I have been persecuted with a succession of 
little impertinent complaints; I have been deliver'd some time 
of my broken tooth, by the most dextrous operator, I beleive, 
in the World, but am at present in my Room with a sore throat, 
which is very troublesome to me. I wou'd not have You be 
very uneasy at Harrison's proposal; it appears to me, as it did 
at first, of no consequence, and deserves being spoken of only 
for the Impertinence of it. I am persuaded it is no more 
than an absurd, sudden thought of y e Coll' s ; 'tis hardly possible 
my Brother shou'd have given his consent to it as a foundation 
for Harrison to proceed upon with me. My Brother's Interest 
no doubt do's not persuade him to such a bargain between 
Harrison and me : if he intends to consult that, in the disposition 
of this seat in Parliament, he must certainly rather oblige me to 
accept of satisfaction for the loss of it by something he may 
obtain for me, and chuse a man more agreeable to Sir Robt. 
than Harrison, who will put him two thousand pounds in Pocket : 
I am very much deceived if I hear any thing more of it. You 
misunderstood me in thinking I had given no sort of answer to 
the proposal. I was, I confess, little sollicitous about giving a 
speedy one or a very particular one : I said to Harriot in general 
that I was extremely surprised at the offer : that an answer was 
almost needless for the Coll., if he had thought of it since, must 
be able to guess what answer it deserved, that I was sorry she 

lf To the Hon Ws M" Ann Pitt at St. James's London. Free — Will, 
Herbert.' 

6 69 



LORD CHATHAM 

had employ'd herself at all in so strange a Proposal, in short 
something to that effect. I apprehend no difficulties from this 
affair; if I have any to encounter they'l come from another 
Quarter. I wrote to a certain Gentleman * above a month ago, 
without answer, so judge of his kind disposition towards me. 
my Lord Pembroke is very good in leaving it in my Power to 
come to Town, if I found it necessary. I have at present no 
thoughts of making use of his Indulgence. I want to see you 
more than you can imagine. Adieu : 

Y rs most affec ly 

W. Pitt. 

Lady Suffolk, Ann's principal friend at Court, has now 
retired from an ungrateful servitude. The loss must have 
been great to Ann, who required more than most an ex- 
perienced and sagacious friend at her elbow. 

Newbury Nov: y e 17: 1734. 
Dear Nanny, — I was persuaded my Lady Suffolk's removal 
from court wou'd affect you in the Manner you tell me it dos: 
Your Friend M rs Herbert, where I dined the day before yesterday, 
was speaking of the thing with concern and was sure it wou'd 
touch you, as much as any Body: your Greifs are so much mine 
that it wou'd be needless to tell you I am sorry for your Loss; I 
foresee a very disagreeable consequence to you from this change, 
which is, that your Friendship with Her may be charg'd upon 
you as a crime, and what was before a support may now be a 
prejudice to you. Harriot's complaint is far from giving me any 
uneasiness, I think nothing but such a necessity wou'd have 
made Them do what they indisputably ought to do. my concern 
for Her is, that her situation is so bad as to render this circum- 
stance, (distresfull as it is) necessary to put her into a better. 
Poor Girl, what unnatural cruelty and Insolence she has to suffer 
from A Person 2 that shou'd be her support and comfort in this 
distress: I have heard him say so many hard Things upon this 
affair, that I think I do him no injustice to say he will be more 
inexorable than the Knight. 3 I suppose Lyttelton is return'd 

1 Doubtless his brother. 2 His brother. 3 Sir William Corbett. 

70 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

from Stowe and has found a letter from me Laying for him at the 
Admiralty. If he's not come back I am afraid he's ill this 
Pinching weather. I continue well, as I was when I wrote to 
you last. Adieu Dear Nanny, 

Y rs most affec ly 

Wm. Pitt. 1 

The letter that follows is important, as it marks an 
epoch in Pitt's life: for he was now at Stowe, where he 
was to make a long stay, and enrol himself in Cobham's 
band of connections. He had just entered Parliament 2 and 
now commences a politician. But, happily for us, he has 
not yet assumed his political dialect. 

Stowe. July y e 2: 1735: 
Dear Nanny, — I am mighty glad to hear you escaped the 
headach after so fatiguing a journey, but I desire that may not 
prevent your applying to a Physician: I am extremely pleas 'd 
with the account you give me of the Person 3 you saw, it is a great 
step to be able to seem easy: I wish his mind may ever be as 
easy, as I have the pleasure of hearing his affairs are at present, 
the other Part of your letter astonishes me: I think he'l not 
succeed, tho' I assure you he has my good wishes, for I am per- 
suaded nothing less will ever extricate him. The turn indeed is 
very sudden, but since he has taken it, he'l disgrace himself less by 
obtaining, than losing. My L d Cobham wou'd have been very 
glad to see you and wish'd I had brought you, I am sorry you 
lost so good an opportunity of seeing Stowe. Adieu 

mostaf! ly y rs 

Wm. Pitt. 
I have had other business to write to my Brother upon, 
which has hinder'd my speaking of the Orange trees. I'l make 
Ayscough do it. 

I hope you found Lady Suffolk well. 

The next letter is burthened with mysterious and anony- 
mous allusions, as to which conjecture is futile. 

1 'To The Hon Me M re Ann Pitt at St. James's London.' 

2 Elected Feb. 18, 1735. 3 Doubtless his brother. 

71 



LORD CHATHAM 

Stowe July y e 20: 1735. 
Dear Nanny, — I am mighty glad you are so well satisfy 'd 
with the match you give me an account of: I was not surpris'd 
to hear it, for I fancy 'd I saw it long ago. I have all sort of 
reasons to wish Her happy, but to mention no other, She loves 
you in the manner I am apt to think one shou'd love you. the 
Person 1 you think pretty easy, is far from it : he endeavours to 
acquiesce under Pain, to bring his mind, if possible, to such a 
state of composure as to go through the duties of Life like an 
honest and Reasonable Man. our Friends 2 Repulse is the most 
scandalous and ignominious of all things. I want to hear a little 
of his noble designs for next year: Despair must produce 
something Extraordinary in so great a mind. I am seriously 
ashamed of him, and if he was to ask my advice what he should 
do, I think I cou'd only beg him to do nothing: that Man's whole 
life is a sort of consolation to me in my poor little circumstances. 
He gives me occasion to reflect too often, that I wou'd not act his 
Part one month for twice his estate, but I leave him to talk to 
you of yourself : I don't hear what Broxom says of your headach's : 
if you have not consulted him you have used me very ill : Pray 
send for him and let me know if you are better. Adieu. 

most affectionately Y rs 

Wm. Pitt. 

Pope and Martha Blount were now at Stowe, so was 
Lady Suffolk; and William was polishing himself in the 
best company. 

Stow Sept. y e 2 : 1735. 

Don't say a word more of my never writing, but confess im- 
mediately that you admire my way of writing more than any 
Body's, that is my way of sending you Postcripts Every Day: I 
have nothing to say of Letters, but M r Pope 3 says somewhere, 
'Heaven first taught Postscripts for the wretches aid,' etc: you 
must know I han't a word to say to you; for I write qnly to 
introduce the Postscript, as M r Bays wou'd make a Poem to bring 

1 Lyttelton — a mere guess. 2 Doubtless his brother. 

3 N. B. — Pope was at Stowe during this month. See Lady Suffolk's Letters, 
ii. 143. 

72 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

in a fine thought, that was none of his own ; I therefore finish to 
leave more room for my Lady Suffolk, adieu. 

[In another hand, evidently Lady Suffolk's] how often my 
Dear Child have I wish'd you here? I know you wou'd like it, 
and I know two who thinks {sic) even Stowe wou'd be still more 
agreeable they talk of you I believe both Love you ; but one can 
pun, and talk nonsense w th M rs Blount most Elegantly remember 
Saturday and never forget me, that is, do not be ungratefull 

We see in the next letter that Pitt was not merely 
supping with the wits, but playing at cricket, with Pope 
perhaps as umpire. 

Stow Sepf y e 14: 1735. 
I am very well pleas 'd with the conversation you Had lately, 
and that you met with nothing in it that at all corresponds 
with the Subject of my former letter: I shall now be at ease, 
and give myself no more trouble in thinking and conjecturing 
about it. I am glad my Lady Suffolk got so well to Town; if 
she's not the worse for her journey, I fancy you are not much so 
for her return, if she did not happen to be the most amiable 
Estimable Person one has seen, I shou'd still love her For the 
admirable Talent she has of Distinguishing and Describing merit, 
in which she do's not yeild to the Noble L d of our acquaintance, 
if she has done me justice, She has Told you I was very stupid 
and play'd very well at Cricket. I obey'd her orders to my L d 
and Lady Cobham; my L ds reflection was, He wish'd he cou'd 
take such a journey and do after it just what she did. when you 
see Lyttelton, tell him M r Pope has been writing a letter to him 
ever since he has been here, but head-ach and Laziness has 
delay 'd it, so so that I believe He may be time enough at London 
to bring the letter to him himself, as he talks of setting out in a 
few days. Ayscough has been here, and desires Lyttelton will 
mention him to the Speaker for preaching before the House the 
next 30th of January sermon. I'l leave off for fear I shou'd 
think of half a dozen messages more. 

I am most affec ly Y rs W. Pitt. 

direct to me at Stow I am more here than at Touster 
[?Towcester]. You must say 'member of Pari*' They 
make me pay always else. 

73 



LORD CHATHAM 

The next two letters deal with some dark transaction 
relating to wine, probably smuggled, from Guernsey. 

Stow Sept. y e 16: 1735. 
I am very sorry I can't answer all your Questions this Post, 
but to begin with that I can answer the Frame Maker's Name 
is Bellamy, he lives in Rupert Street: as to the Guernsey wine, 
it is a commission of so secret a Nature, and must be treated with 
such art and circumspection, (according to the instructions I 
am honour 'd with) That I must desire further time to get the 
lights necessary to the full discovery of so dark an affair. I have 
been able to penetrate no farther than that my L d Cobham and 
his Butler are the only Persons at the bottom of the secret, The 
one I can't ask he being abroad ; the other I must not, being ty'd 
up by my orders: there remains therefore nothing To be done 
but to wait the return of the Butler, or larger Power to treat with 
my L d in Person, but to talk no longer like a Minister, but an 
humble Servant of my lady Suffolk's, I desire my compliments to 
Her, and I'l be sure to send an answer about the wine next Post. 
I please myself with thinking you are free from Head-ach, both 
as they are very bad things ; and because they are y e effect with 
you of other uneasiness: be well and happy, is the only advice 
you want; and the only means by which I can be so: 

I am most affec ly y rs 

W. Pitt. 

Stowe. Sept. y e 19: 1735. 
If you happen to write to me once in a week or fortnight I am 
never to hear the last of it ; but pray admire the exact diligence 
of my correspondence: I don't only answer your letter the first 
Post, but I continue answering It two or three Posts successively : 
I am now only at the second, and you shall see you are not above 
half answer'd yet: but to tell you all I can, the Man M r Hardy, 
who sells my L d Cobham the Wine in Question, is now in Guern- 
sey; the Buttler will write to his correspondent to know when 
he is like to return, which he supposes must be soon — all which 
my Lady Suffolk shall be informed of : I expect a clear distinct 
answer from you to each letter of the volumes I have lately writ 
to you. Adieu. 

74 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

The following letter alludes in all probability to his 
brother, and also to that Richard Grenville who was after- 
wards so notorious as Lord Temple. It seems strange 
when one recalls Temple in maturity to read of him as 
Dick, with a careless countenance and jolly laugh. But 
everybody has been young. 

Stowe. Sept. y e 28: 1735. 

I don't understand this way of answering two letters in form, 
avec un Trait de Plume; I expected you shou'd have told me 
you had nothing to tell me in more words, or at least at two 
different times: this sort of Correspondence, where one must, 
not talk, seems rather a sort of visit to shew yourself: I hope 
you won't be in such a hurry next time; that I shall see you a 
little longer, or I shall call it only leaving your name, after 
all this, I am not really angry at the shortness of your last letter ; 
you gave a reason that satisfied me entirely. I hope our friend 
is well; I had the Pleasure of hearing he seem'd in very good 
Spirits, when Dick Greenville (sic) saw him; I hope really was 
so. I suppose You have seen Dick's careless countenance at 
Kensington, and that you begin to be acquainted with his 
Laugh. I am called to breakfast, so goodby 

Y rs most affectionately 

W. Pitt. 

October finds William still at Stowe, and not likely to 
leave, but he sends this anxious and tender note to Ann. 

Stowe. October y e 5: 1735. 

My Dear, — I long to be with you to know what the particular 
circumstance is that gives you uneasiness: or is it only the 
Thing in general? whatever it be, take all the comfort you can 
in knowing you act humanely and honourably, it won't be in 
my Power to see you till December, and the latter End of it. 
I am very much at Stowe, and pass my time as agreeably as I 
can do at a distance from you at a time you say you want to 
talk to me: I hope by your next letter to hear you have talk'd 

75 



LORD CHATHAM 

to yourself upon the Subject of your uneasiness and don't want 
my advice: Adieu, 

I am with all affection y rs 

W. Pitt. 1 

The next note deals again with the affair which is caus- 
ing Ann uneasiness, but without giving us any clue to it. 
One cannot however refrain from the surmise that Ann's 
temper and tongue had now begun to get her into trouble. 

Stowe. Octob r y 12: 1735. 
My dear Child, — I can't by letter enter into particulars 
relating to The affair you mention, nor were I with you, cou'd 
I give you any other than a general advice, which is, as well as 
you can to make yourself and others easy: I know this is saying 
almost nothing, and that is the very thing I think you have 
only to do : I beg you will be at Quiet as to what you have hitherto 
done, believe me it is not only irreproachable, but must do you 
great honour with whoever know your conduct. I will say 
one word more, which is this, that you shou'd take care not to 
be misunderstood, at least in any great degree. This is all I 
can say to you, who have the warmest concern for your happiness 
and am with more affection than I can tell you, 

Y rs W. Pitt. 

There is now an unexplained interval of two years. 
Some letters have perhaps been lost or destroyed, one has 
apparently miscarried; or, still more probably, the brother 
and sister have been together. But the next letter is still 
dated from Stowe, where William was evidently established 
on the most familiar footing. 

Stow. Nov r y e 6: 1737. 

You are even with me for all the want of readiness in writing, 
ever since I began to correspond: I wou'd tell you how many 
weeks it is, since I wrote to you my last unanswer'd letter, if 

1 'To the Hon* 1 " M" Pitt at Kensington House Middlesex. Free — W 
Pitt.' 

76 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

my memory was strong enough to carry so remote a period of 
Chronology in my head: I have sometimes told you I have been 
ashamed of not writing: I take this occasion to retract all Dec- 
larations of that sort, and tell you I never was, nor ever will be 
ashamed of want of regularity in corresponding, after this last 
silence of yours: I am aware that you must throw the blame 
upon y e Post, and say you never received the letter in question, 
and indeed the Doctor has given me an intimation, y* the thing 
was to take y* turn, without which you wou'd not have been 
troubled even with these reproaches, the Letter had nothing 
in it, and yet I had rather you had receiv'd it, if you are in earnest 
that you did not. I intend to be in Town the beginning of 
December : I shall see Mrs. Nedham at Bampton before I come : 

Y rs W. Pitt. 

I desire you will write immediately to let me know you have 
no return of y 6 disorder you had just before you left Hampton 
court. 

In the next he refers to Lord Cornbury, a friend, a 
Tory, and something of a Jacobite. He was a great ad- 
mirer of Pitt, and had indeed written an ode to him. 

Stow. Nov r y e 1 2 : 1737. 
I do not think myself obliged to thank you for your letter, it 
was a defence to an accusation, you was under a necessity of 
pleading and you did it with the confidence of an old offender, 
and even went so far as to recriminate upon y r accuser: but let 
the act of oblivion cover all. however that I may thank you for 
something, I thank you for haveing hardly any remains of y r 
cold. Pray keep keeping yourself well till December, in one week 
of which month I hope to see you. Adieu. 

Y rs Most affec ,y 

W. Pitt. 

I wish you the Dutchess of Queensbury and Lady Cardigan 
with all my heart. How do's L d Cornbury? 



LORD CHATHAM 



CHAPTER IV 

MORE than sixteen years elapse between this letter 
and the next, which takes us far beyond our pres- 
ent limit, but it is best to finish the story of Ann. Part of 
this long interval can be explained by extreme harmony, 
and the remainder by the reverse. The mutual devotion 
of William and Ann lasted, says Lord Camelford, till he be- 
came Paymaster in May, 1746: then they quarrelled. Why, 
no one knows, or, it is to be presumed, will ever know. 
Horace Walpole only says that Pitt shook his sister off in 
an unbecoming manner. Camelford thinks that Pitt dis- 
liked Ann's friendship for Lady Bolingbroke, and thought 
that she was under the influence of Bolingbroke himself, 
'that tawdry fellow, as Lord Cobham called him.' 1 Pitt, 
like most other people, except the rare spirits who loved 
the brilliant being, profoundly distrusted Bolingbroke, and 
may not have wished to see Bolingbroke influence assume 
a footing in his house. Perhaps then he remonstrated, 
perhaps Ann vindicated her friendship with heat. Be- 
tween these two fiery natures words might be exchanged 
in a moment which years would not obliterate. Grattan 
told Rogers that 'Mrs. Ann Pitt, Lord Chatham's sister, 
was a very superior woman. She hated him, and they 
lived like cat and dog. He could only get rid of her by 
leaving his house and setting a bill on it, "This house to 
let.'" 2 If these two Pitts quarrelled in the fierce Pitt 
fashion, it is not unlikely that some such expedient would 

1 Camelford MS. * Recollections of Samuel Rogers, p. 104. 

78 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

be adopted. But it must be doubted whether they lived 
like cat and dog, else they would have parted long before. 
Grattan's statement was made in conversation with all 
the large outline and picturesque latitude that conversa- 
tion allows, and he probably knew nothing about the mat- 
ter. We can only surmise. Lord Camelford tells us that 
up to the time of the Paymastership (1746) William and 
Ann had lived together in one of the small houses in Pall 
Mall which look into St. James's Square, and that when he 
moved to his official residence at the Pay Office he moved 
alone. But, as a matter of fact, she had left him some 
time before, and gone to live with Lady Bolingbroke at 
Argeville. We have a letter from William to Lady Suffolk, 
dated July 6th, 1742, in which he favours the plan of Ann's 
living with Lady Bolingbroke, so long as is convenient to 
her hostess, and then returning home. Moreover, Pitt him- 
self in October of this year 1742 was not living in Pall Mall, 
but had moved to York Street, Burlington Buildings. 1 
Ann had formed a mad project of living in Paris as a single 
woman, which William justly discountenanced. However, 
she proceeded to Argeville, where George Grenville found 
her in September. She may have returned to her brother, 
but she probably remained abroad, and her having been 
with the Bolingbrokes so long, even with William's sanc- 
tion, may have made her less welcome to her brother on 
her return. 

In June, 1751, she was appointed Keeper of the Privy 
Purse to the Princess of Wales, and superintendent of the 
education of the Princess Augusta, afterwards Duchess of 
Brunswick. She obtained this appointment, we are told, 
through the interest of Mr. Cresset, the confidential servant 
and Treasurer of the Princess of Wales, whose authority 
in the Court soon afterwards gave way to the ascendancy 

1 Grenville Papers, i. 13. 

79 



LORD CHATHAM 

of Lord Bute; though Pitt imagined that here again he 
could trace the hand of Bolingbroke. 'However,' says 
Lord Camelford, 'thinking she could be useful to him in 
so important a post, he sought a reconciliation — he nat- 
tered, he menaced, he insulted, but was rejected.' 

Of these proceedings two records remain in letters which 
have already been published, but cannot be omitted here, 
as they are instinct with passion and light. Whether they 
answer to Lord Camelford 's description must be left to the 
judgment of those who read them. That they are power- 
ful, tender, and unaffected all must allow. They also con- 
tain quotations from the quarrels which are not devoid of 
interest. Ann had declared that William expected abso- 
lute deference and a blind submission to his will ; and that 
he had in several conversations directly explained to her 
that, to satisfy him, she must live with him as his slave. 
On this point William admits that he did expect some 
measure of deference to his views, and that, living together, 
he thought she might shape her life in some degree to his. 
This seems to have been the real ground of separation. 
William wished to be master in his own house. Ann could 
brook no control. Perhaps the brother may have asked 
the sister to discontinue or relax her intimacy with the 
Bolingbrokes, as injurious and inconvenient to him, and 
Ann, we may guess, would curtly bid him mind his own 
business. But these are only probabilities. 

In the course of these proceedings we learn that Will- 
iam lost his temper, declaring that she had a bad head 
and a worse heart ; for this he humbly begs her par- 
don. 

Another complaint of Ann's is easily explained. She 
says that William had been talking of the 200/. a year that 
he allowed her. William's answer makes it perfectly clear 
that he had been reproached with the fact of his sister's 

80 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

destitute condition, and that he had had to explain, in his 
own defence, that he gave her this income. 

Whether Pitt wished for a reconciliation because his 
sister had become Privy Purse to the Princess of Wales 
must be judged by the light of his character. It seems 
more probable that it was because she had returned from 
abroad, and that he would now meet her constantly in 
society. In any case, here are the letters. Whatever 
Pitt's motives may have been, it is clear that Ann, had she 
not been a vixen, would have gladly accepted the olive- 
branch offered by her brother, who, still unmarried, wished 
to be restored to the companionship which had been the 
joy of his life, ' that friendship which was my very existence 
for so many years, ' ' a harmony between brother and sister 
unexampled almost all that time.' 

(A) 

June 19, 1 75 1. Wednesday morning. 

Dear Sister ! — As you had been so good to tell me in your note 
of Monday that you would write to me again soon in a manner 
capable, you hoped, of effacing every impression of any thing painfull 
that may have passed from me to you, I did not expect such a letter 
as I found late last night, and which I have now before me to 
answer : without any compliment to you, I find myself in point of 
writing unequal enough to the task ; nor have I the slightest de- 
sire to sharpen my pen. I have well weighed your letter, and 
deeply examined your picture of me, for some years past; and 
indeed, Sister, I still find something within, that firmly assures 
me I am not that thing which your interpretations of my life (if 
I can ever be brought to think them all your own) would repre- 
sent me to be. I have infirmities of temper, blemishes, and faults, 
if you please, of nature, without end; but the Eye that can't be 
deceived must judge between us, whether that friendship, which 
was my very existence for so many years, could ever have received 
the least flaw, but from umbrages and causes which the quickest 
sensibility and tenderest jealousy of friendship alone, at first, 



LORD CHATHAM 

suggested. It is needless to mark the unhappy epoque, so fatal 
to a harmony between sister and brother unexampled almost all 
that time, the loss of which has embitter'd much of my life and 
will always be an affliction to me. But I will avoid running into 
vain retrospects and unseasonable effusions of heart, in order to 
hasten to some particular points of your letter, upon which it is 
necessary for me to trouble you with a few words. Absolute 
deference and blind submission to my will, you tell me I have often 
declared to you in the strongest and most mortifying terms cou'd 
alone satisfy me. I must here beseech you cooly to reconsider 
these precise terms, with their epithets; and I will venture to 
make the appeal to the sacred testimony of your breast, whether 
there be not exaggeration in them. I have often, too often re- 
proached you, and from warmth of temper, in strong and plain 
terms, that I found no longer the same consent of minds and 
agreement of sentiments: and I have certainly declared to you 
that I cou'd not be satisfy'd with you, and I could no longer find 
in you any degree of deference towards me. I was never so drunk 
with presumption as to expect absolute deference and blind sub- 
mission to my will. A degree of deference to me and to my situ- 
ation, I frankly own, I did not think too much for me to expect 
from you, with all the high opinion I really have of your parts. 
What I expected was too much (as perhaps might be). In our 
former days friendship had led me into the error. That error is at 
an end, and you may rest assured, that I can never be so unrea- 
sonable as to expect from you, now, anything like deference to 
me or my opinions. I come next to the small pecuniary assistance 
which you accepted from me, and which was exactly as you state 
it, two hundred pounds a year. I declare, upon my honour, I 
never gave the least foundation for those exaggerations which you 
say have been spread concerning it. I also declare as solemnly, 
before God and man, that no consideration cou'd ever have ex- 
torted from my lips the least mention of the trifling assistance you 
accepted from me, but the cruel reports, industriously propagated, 
and circulating from various quarters round to me, of the state 
you was left to live in. As to the repayment of this wretched 
money, allow me, dear Sister, to entreat you to think no more of 
it. The bare thought of it may surely suffice for your own dignity 
and for my humiliation, without taxing your present income, 

82 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

merely to mortify me : the demonstration of a blow is, in honour, 
a blow, and let me conjure you to rest it here. When I want and 
you abound, I promise you to afford you a better and abler tri- 
umph over me, by asking the assistance of your purse. I will 
now trouble you no farther than to repeat my sincere wishes for 
your welfare and to rejoice that you have so ample matter for the 
best of happiness, springing from a heart and mind (to use your 
own words) entirely devoted to gratitude and duty. 

(B) 

June 20, 175 1. Pay Office. 
' Dear Sister ! — I am this moment returned out of the Country 
and find another letter from you. I am extremely sorry that any 
expressions in mine to you should make you think it necessary 
for you to trouble yourself to write again, that you might convey 
upon paper to me, what you would avoid saying in conversation, 
as disagreeable and painfull. I believe I may venture to refer 
you to the whole tenor of my letter to convince yourself that I 
had no desire to irritate ; and I assure you very sincerely that the 
expression, which seems to have had some of that effect, did not 
in the least flow from a thought that you was capable of intending 
to represent falsely. I only took the liberty to put it to your 
candid recollection, whether the very cause you mention, strong 
feelings and emotions of mind attending them, with regard to 
conversations of a disagreeable kind, might not have led to some 
exaggerations of them to your own self. I verily believe this 
cause, and this alone may have had some of this effect : for sure 
I am, that I never could wish, much less exact that the object of 
my whole heart and of my highest opinion and confidence, thro 
the best part of my days, could be capable of such vileness as 
absolute deference and blind submission to my will. All I wished 
and what I but late quite despaired of, I took the liberty to recall 
to you in my last letter. As to the late conversation you have 
thought necessary (since your letter of yesterday) to recollect, I 
am ready to take shame before you, and all mankind, if you 
please, for having lost my temper, upon any provocation, so far as 
to use expressions, as foolish as they are angry: that you had a 
bad head will easily pass for the first: and a worse heart for the 
last. This you made me angry enough to say: but this I never 

83 



LORD CHATHAM 

was, nor I hope shall be, angry enough to think: and this, Sister, 
I am sure you know. As to the other word, which I am sorry I 
used because it offended you, I will again beg to appeal to your 
recollection, whether it was not apply'd to your forbidding me 
ever to talk to you of every thing that interested you : and as to shaping 
your life in some degree to mine, which I believe were my very 
words, let me ask you, if you don't know that they were said in an 
answer to your telling me that I had in several conversations directly 
explained to you that to satisfy me you must live with me as my slave? 
So much, dear Sister, for the several points of your letter ; which 
I am sorry to find it necessary to say so many words upon. I will 
be with you by nine to-morrow, as that hour seems most con- 
venient to you : is it impossible I may still find you so obliging as 
not to think any more of repaying what I certainly never lent you, 
in any other sense than that of giving me a right to your purse, 
whenever I should want it, and which you must forego some 
convenience to repay ?' 1 

Whether a reconciliation took place on this occasion or 
not we have no evidence apart from Camelford's. But if 
he is to be believed as to William's motives, there was little 
to be gained by one, for Ann was soon to leave the Court. 
Her new office 'very soon grew uneasy to her,' says her 
nephew, 'through the artifices of her royal pupil.' Horace 
Walpole gives a different account. ' Being of an intriguing 
and most ambitious nature, she soon destroyed her own 
prospect by an impetuosity to govern her mistress and 
by embarking in other cabals at that Court. Her disgrace 
followed, but without dismissal, on which she had retired to 
France. ' 2 

'It was then,' says Camelford, 'that her brother, then 
Secretary of State, made a new overture of reconciliation by 
a letter that you will read, which had too much the appear- 
ance of sincerity and disinterestedness not to be gladly 
accepted. ' 

1 Chatham MSS. * Orford, i. 85. 

84 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

Camelford is not particularly careful of his own accuracy 
or consistency. He had just told us that William sought 
for a renewal of friendship because Ann would be useful to 
him at Court: he now has to acknowledge that when Ann 
was banished from Court he instantly sought reconciliation 
with more ardour than ever. As regards his accuracy, it 
need only be noted that the letter to which he alludes is 
dated from the Pay Office, and despatched more than three 
years before Pitt became Secretary ; a flaw, but not a grave 
flaw, in a father writing from memory to his son. 

Here is the letter, which seems to be in answer to one 
from Ann, and which is surely as tender and affectionate as 
the sorest heart of sister could desire : 

Pay Office. Feb. 8. 1753. 

Dear Sister, — I shou'd have receiv'd the most sensible satis- 
faction, if you had been able to tell me, that the more declared, or 
new symptoms of your disorder had been such, as gave you a near 
prospect of being quite relieved, believe me Dear Sister, my 
heart is fill'd with the' most affectionate wishes for your health, 
and impatient desire to see you return home well and happy. I 
never can reflect on things passed, (wherein I must have been 
infinitely in the wrong, if I ever gave you a pain) without the 
tenderest sorrow: and the highest aggravation of this concern 
wou'd be to think, that, perhaps, you may not understand the 
true state of my heart towards you. Heaven preserve my Dear 
Sister, and may I ever be able to convince her how sincerely I am 
her most affectionate Brother: 

W. Pitt. 

I continue an Invalid, and wait for better weather with as 
much patience as I can. 

This is followed by another letter so humble and so self- 
reproachful that one can scarcely believe it to be penned by 
one whose pride was a byeword, and one can certainly not 
7 85 



LORD CHATHAM 

believe it to be the production of crafty and servile selfish- 
ness, as Lord Camelford would have us imagine. No 
brother could approach a sister with more delicacy or 
warmth of feeling. 

Pay Office. Feb. 27. 1753. 
Dear Sister, — I am unable to express the load you have taken 
off my heart by your affectionate and generous answer to my last 
letter : I will recur no more to a subject, which your goodness and 
forgiveness forbid me to mention, the concern I feel for your 
state of health is most sensible ; wou'd to God, you may be shortly 
in a situation to give me the infinite comfort of hearing of an 
amendment in it ! I hope Spring is forwarder, where you reside, 
than with us, and that the difference of climate begins to be felt. 
I will not give you the trouble to read any more : but must repeat, 
in the fulness of my heart, the warmest and tenderest acknowledge- 
ments of your goodness to, 

My Dear Sister, Your most affec Brother 

W. Pitt. 

I continue still a good deal out of Order, but begin to get 
ground. 

The next letter marks a complete removal of tension and 
the restoration of close and friendly relations. It cannot, 
alas! restore the easy flow of youth. A score of years have 
passed, William has been buffeted and tossed and has had 
to fight hard for his hand ; he is besides so much the older. 
So we find ourselves involved in the fulsome extravagance 
of his maturer epistles ; so much the worse ! 

London. April y e 5. 1753. 
My Dear Sister, — Nothing can be felt more sensibly than 
I do the goodness of your letter, in which you talk to me circum- 
stantially of your own health, and desire to hear circumstantially 
of mine, it is a great deal of Comfort to me to know that you 
have great hopes of being better by M r Vernage's advice ; but it 
wou'd have been an infinite satisfaction to have heard that you 
had already found amendment. May every Day of Spring con- 

86 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

tribute to the thing in the world I wish the most ardently! I 
am infinitely glad that the concurrent opinions of Physicians of 
both Countries are the foundation of expecting the Spa will 
relieve you: I shall dwell all I can on this comfortable hope, and 
beg to hear of any amendment you may find by better weather 
and whatever course you now use. I will now talk of that health 
you so kindly desire to hear of. I have been ill all the winter 
with disorders in my bowels, which have left me very low, and 
reduced me to a weak state of health. I am now, in many 
respects, better, and seem getting ground, by riding and taking 
better nourishment. Warmer weather, I am to hope, will be 
of much service to me. I propose using some mineral waters: 
Tunbridge or Sunning Hill or Bath, at their proper seasons, 
as the main of my complaint is much abated and almost removed, 
I hope my Horse, warm weather and proper nourishment will 
give me health again, the kind concern you take in it is infinitely 
felt by, Dear Sister, 

Your most affectionate Brother 

W. Pitt. 

The next letter shows that Ann was residing at Blois. 

Dear Sister, — I have just receiv'd the pleasure of your letter 
of 30 April, the Comfort it has given me is infinitely great, 
and your goodness in sending me the earliest account in your 
power of such an amendment as you now describe is the kindest 
thing imaginable, May the fine season, where you are, continue 
without interruption, and every Day of it add to the beneficial 
effects you have begun to feel! our season here does not keep 
pace with that at Blois : I am however much mended in several 
respects, and have the greatest hopes given me of removing 
my remaining disorder by the help of warmer weather and Tun- 
bridge waters. I have just time to write this line before dinner, 
and had I more, I think it best not to trouble you with long 
letters. I shall dine upon your letter I am dear Sister 

Your most affectionate Brother 

London. May f h 1753. W. Pitt. 

Here intervenes a letter to Mary, in which there is cordial 
mention of Ann, and an obvious allusion to the escapades 

87 



LORD CHATHAM 

of Elizabeth ; surely a tender letter from a brother of forty- 
five to a younger sister. 

Bath. Ocf the 20 th . 1753. 
I am very glad to hear in the Conclusion of my Dear Mary's 
letter that she will be under no difficulty in getting to London : 
my Brother is very obliging, as I dare say he intends to be in 
all things towards you, to make your journey easy and agreeable 
to you. I propose being in Town by the meeting of the Parlia- 
ment ; if I am able : when I shall have infinite Joy in meeting my 
Dear Sister after so very long an Absence and seeing Her in a 
Place where she seems to think herself not unhappy, if I shou'd 
be prevented being in Town so soon, the House will always be 
ready to receive you. I think you judge very right not to 
produce yourself much till we have met: M rs Stuart, and my 
Sister Nedham, if in Town, will be the properest, as well as the 
most agreeable Places for you to frequent. My Dear Child, I 
need not intimate to your good understanding and right Inten- 
tions, what a high degree of Prudence and exact attention to 
your Conduct and whole behaviour is render'd necessary by the 
sad errors of others. It is an infinite misfortune to you that 
my Sister Ann is not in England: her Countenance and her 
Advice and Instructions, superior to any you can otherwise 
receive, wou'd be the highest advantage to you. Supply it as 
well as you can, by thinking of Her, imitating her worth, and 
thereby endeavouring to deserve her esteem, as you wish to 
obtain that of the best Part of the World. I can not express 
how anxious I am for your right behaviour in all respects, upon 
which alone your happiness must depend, whatever assistance 
my advice can be to You, you will ever have with the truest 
affection of a Brother. 

Y rs W. Pitt. 

The next letter is pregnant enough, written to Ann at 
Nevers. Their aunt Essex is dead, but her death only lurks 
in a postscript. For Pelham is dead and Pitt is a cripple 
at Bath, disabled from proceeding to the capital, where his 
fate and that of the future administration are being settled. 
His restless anguish seems to pierce through these few 

88 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

lines. And yet this bedridden invalid was to be a joyful 
and alert bridegroom before the year was out. 

Bath. March g th : 1754. 

Dear Sister, — I write to you under the greatest affliction, on 
all Considerations Private and Publick. M r Pelham Died 
Wednesday morning, of a Feaver and St. Anthony's fire. This 
Loss is, in my notion of things, irreparable to the Publick. I 
am still suffering much Pain with Gout in both feet, and utterly 
unable To be carry'd to London. I may hope to be the better 
for it hereafter, but I am at present rather worn down than 
releiv'd by it: I am extremely concern'd at the last accounts of 
your health. I hope you have Spring begun at Nevers, which 
I pray God may relieve you. 

I am Dear Sister, Your most affectionate Brother, 

W. Pitt. 

My Sister Nedham has been ill of a Feaver here, but is well 
again. 

I have just received an account of M rs Cholmondeley's 1 
Death. 

The next letter, a month later, leaves Pitt still at Bath ; 
the gout had almost the lion's share of his life, and we won- 
der that he accomplished so much under its constant pangs. 
On this occasion he strains our credulity by the compli- 
mentary assertion that he thinks a thousand times more of 
Ann than of the struggle over Pelham 's succession, and 
his own involved ambition. On all that sordid scramble he 
kept the fierce, unflinching eye of a hawk, and of a hawk 
fastened by the talon. Ten days before he wrote this note 
he had despatched a letter to Newcastle, Pelham 's brother 
and successor, burning with a passion which Ann 's ailments 
could never have inspired. Ann indeed, knowing her Will- 
iam, would smile as she read, and value the extravagance 
at its worth. 

1 His aunt. 
89 



LORD CHATHAM 

Bath. April 4 ih - 1754. 

Dear Sister, — The Account you give me of your own health, 
and the kind concern you feel for mine, touches me more than I 
will attempt to express, tho' I am still at Bath, don't think the 
worse of my health, but be assured that I am in a fairer way of 
recovering a tolerable degree of it, than I have been in for a long 
time pass't. My Gout has been most regular and severe, as well 
as of a proper Continuance to relieve, and perhaps quite remove, 
the general disorder which had brought me so low. I am recov- 
ering my feet and drinking the waters with more apparent good 
effects than I ever experienced from them. I have been out 
of all the bustle of the present Conjuncture; and believe me, 
my thoughts go a thousand times to Nevers, for once that they 
go towards London. Nothing in this world can, in the smallest 
degree, interest my mind like the recovery of your health. I 
wait with very painfull Impatience for better weather for you, 
and to hear, that the waters you propose to take, afford you 
relief. 

I am My Dear Sister's ever most affectionate Brother 

W. Pitt. 

My sister Nedham is well, and went yesterday to Marybone 
to see her Sons. 

Poor George Stanhope died of a feaver a few days since. 1 

The next, after an interval of six months, is again from 
Bath, but in a different strain. He is now the happiest of 
men, about to be united to the most meritorious and 
amiable of women, whose brothers are already his own in 
harmony and affection; a happy marriage, but a disas- 
trous, storm-tossed brotherhood, as it was destined to be in 
the years to come, when rival ambitions would strain the 
bond to breaking. 

There is also an icicle from Lady Hester herself, which 
embodies the decorous expression of what a young lady of 
the middle eighteenth century allowed herself to feel when 

1 Their cousin, Colonel the Hon. George Stanhope, who distinguished 
himself at Falkirk and Culloden. 

90 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

she was going to be married. Even this act of politeness 
was inspired' by William. 'I have writ this night to my 
poor sister Ann. She is not well enough to return to Eng- 
land this winter. Whenever your excessive goodness will 
honour her with a letter it will be a comfort to her. If you 
please to commit it to me I will forward it to her, and bless 
you a million of times. ' * 

Bath. Oct. 21 st . 1754. 

Dear Sister, — The favour of your letter from Chaillot has by 
no means answered my eager wishes for your health, and a kind 
of distant hope I had formed of your return to England this 
winter. My desires to see you are greatly and very painfully 
disappointed: I have only to hope that your Stay in France 
will give you a much better winter than the last, and may finally 
restore your health to you and you to your Friends. I am now, 
Dear Sister, to impart to you what I have no longer a prospect 
of doing, with infinitely more pleasure, by word of mouth : it is 
to say, that, your health excepted, I have nothing to wish for my 
happiness, Lady Hester Grenville has consented to give herself 
to me* and by giving me every thing my Heart can wish, she 
gives you a Sister, I am sure you will find so, not less every other 
way than in name, the act I now communicate, will best speak 
her character, she has generosity and goodness enough to join 
part of her best days to a very shattered part of mine; neither 
has my fortune any thing more tempting. I know no Motif she 
can have but wishing to replace to me many things that I have 
not. I can only add, that I have the honour and satisfaction of 
receiving the most meritorious and amiable of Women from the 
hands of a Family already my Brothers in harmony and affection, 
and who have been kindly Contending which of them shou'd 
most promote my happiness by throwing away the Establishment 
of a Sister they esteem and love so much. When I left Lady 
Hester ten days ago, She wish'd to know when I notify'd this 
approaching event to you, that She might do herself the pleasure 
to write to you. when she knows I have writ, she will introduce 
herself to you. I propose staying here about ten days, if my 

1 Letter dated Oct. 21, 1754, in the Chatham MSS. 
91 



LORD CHATHAM 

patience can hold out so long. You will wonder to see a letter 
on such a subject dated from Bath ; but to a goodness like Lady- 
Hester Grenville's, perhaps, my infirmities and my Poverty are 
my best titles. Your ever affectionate Brother 

W. Pitt. 

Lady Hester Grenville to Miss Ann Pitt. 

May I not hope, D r Madam, that the situation I am in with 
your Brother will dispose you to receive favourably an Instance 
of the extreme desire I have to recommend myself to your 
friendship ; and that You will give me Leave to employ the only 
means in my Power from the distance that is between us, of 
expressing how much I wish to enjoy that Honour. Every Thing 
makes me Ambitious of Obtaining so great an Advantage, and so 
flattering a distinction. Your Own peculiar Merit, and the Large 
share which you possess of M r Pitt's Esteem and Affection makes 
me feel it as an Article important to my Happiness, and I indulge 
myself in the pleasure of thinking that you will not refuse to 
extend your goodness to a Person whom your Brother has thought 
worthy of so convincing a proof of his regard and Love, and 
whose sentiments for Him are full of all that the highest sense 
of his superior Merit and most amiable qualities can Inspire. I 
feel a vanity and a pleasure in being the Object of his Choice, 
which can be added to by nothing but the happiness of knowing 
that you give your Approbation and that you will allow me to 
flatter myself You will not be sorry for an Event which will give 
me the valued privilege of addressing you the next time, I have 
the honour to be thus employ'd, by the endearing name of Sister. 
Give me leave to say that I have heard with the greatest regret 
that your state of health does not permit you to return to England 
this winter, and that I hope as a compensation for the Disap- 
pointment your stay will ensure y r perfect recovery. I commit 
this Letter to Y r B rs Care, and trust to Him for conveying it to 
you, sure that the best recommendation it can have will be its 
coming under his protection; accompanied with Marks of His 
Partiality; and I hope that you will believe D r Madam, that I 
am with all the esteem possible, and the highest regard, 

Your most faithful and Obed. Humble Servant, 

Her: Grenville. 
92 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

In the next letters Pitt and Lady Hester acknowledge 
Ann's congratulations. He had, however, moved to Lon- 
don, and amid all these orange-blossoms was forging ter- 
rible vengeance on his perfidious chief. Within ten days 
of his marriage he was making Newcastle and Newcastle's 
henchmen cower in their offices, though for the present they 
did not dare oust him from his. 

Pay Office. Nov. 8 th . 1754. 

Dear Sister, — Your letter of the i st Nov r has given me all 
that remain 'd to Compleat my happiness, by the affectionate 
Share you take in it; and without which, great as it truly is, 
and shar'd in the kindest manner by every Thing else I value 
and love in the World, it still wou'd have wanted something ever 
essential to my Satisfaction. Your Goodness and Friendship has 
nothing left to give me: Cou'd the re-establishment of your 
health but add that most sensible Pleasure to all I feel, I may 
call myself happy, as it is given but to a few to be. Lady Hester 
Grenville speaks for herself this Post, my Health is not good, 
but, as yet, it is not quite bad. I have gone on with the World 
(as I cou'd) with much worse. 

I am Dear Sister Your most affectionate Brother 

W. Pitt. 

I hope in about a week to say more of my happiness. 

Lady Hester's letter is not worth giving; it is prim, 
decorous, and void. 

Pitt and Lady Hester are married on November 16. 
Lady Hester writes to Ann nine days afterwards a letter 
full of good feeling stiffened and starched by decorum. 
Some letters are too improper to print, this is too proper. 

Ann was now returning home, and Mary goes to meet 
her with a note of welcome from William. Lord Camelford 
says that her health and spirits declined grievously in France, 
and so her brother, 'though not till after repeated notifi- 
cations of her distress, sent over a clergyman to bring her 

93 



LORD CHATHAM 

back to her family and assist in her journey.' This gives 
us a test of Camelford's bias in dealing with his uncle. 
For hear Ann herself, in a letter to Lady Suffolk announcing 
that she was on her way to England, and had arrived as 
far as Sens, whence she writes. Speaking of William, she 
says, 'he continued as he began, as soon as the King had 
put him in the place he is in, by giving me the strongest 
and tenderest proof of his affection. ... I was so sunk 
and my mind so overcome with all I have suffered, and I 
was so mortified and distressed, that I do not believe any- 
thing in the world could have made it possible for me to 
get out of this country, but my brother's sending a friend 
to my assistance, and choosing so proper a person as M r 
de la Porte is in all respects. He has known me and 
my family for about thirty years, from having been my 
Lord Stanhope's Governor.' She goes on to refer to 'the 
virtue and goodness of my friends, particularly of my 
brother, who has always seemed to guess and understand 
all I felt of every kind, and has carried his delicacy so far 
as never once to put me in mind of what I felt more strongly 
than any other part of my misfortune, which was, how very 
disagreeable and embarrassing it must be to him to have 
me in France. You may believe that I will be out of it the 
first minute that is possible.' 

So the fact is that the man, whom Camelford endeavours 
to depict as having acted with hardness and insensibility 
on this occasion, displayed in reality incessant and delicate 
tenderness, according to the grateful acknowledgment of 
Ann herself. Pitt had just attained his supremacy; this 
was the most critical epoch of his life; all the year he had 
been fighting the King and the Court, and this was the 
moment of victory. Eleven days before Ann wrote this 
letter he had become for the second time Secretary of State 
and had begun his great ministry. During this time of 

94 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

strain and anxiety he heard of Ann's illness; he must have 
felt strongly, though he refrained from mentioning it to her, 
the irksomeness of her being in France when he was waging 
war against that kingdom, and so he sent an old family 
friend to conduct her home. Could brother have done 
more? Is there not here an anxious and thoughtful affec- 
tion, distorted grievously by the implacable animosity of 
the nephew? Camelford is, however, obliged to record that 
on her arrival she went straight to Pitt's villa at Hayes, 
'where, tho' her spirits were still weak, she was surprisingly 
recovered.' 

There is no date to the following note which Mary was 
to hand to Ann. But as Ann's letter to Lady Suffolk cited 
above is of July 10, 1757, we cannot be far wrong in placing 
it somewhat later in the same month. It is indeed per- 
plexing to find another letter to Lady Suffolk dated ' Spa, 
September 5, 1757.' But the year 1757 is a surmise, and 
in all probability an incorrect surmise, of the editor. Ann 
was hastening to England in July, 1757, stayed some time 
at Hayes on her arrival, and is not likely to have been on 
the Continent again in September. 

Friday Morning. 
Dear Sister, — I Can not let my Sister Mary go away without 
a line to express my infinite satisfaction to hear you are arrived 
and that you find your strength and Spirits in so good a condition, 
at the same time let a Veteran Invalide recommend to you, above 
all things, to use this returning Strength and Spirits very spar- 
ingly at first. I shou'd be happy to accompany Miss Mary to 
Rochester, but the overwhelming business of this Momentous 
Conjuncture hardly allow (sic) me time to tell you how impa- 
tiently and tenderly I wish to embrace my Dear Sister. 1 

Ann had gone from Hayes to Clifton, as we know from 
a letter to Lady Suffolk dated June 22, 1758, and thence 

1 4 To The Honourable Mrs. Ann Pitt. W. Pitt.' 

95 



LORD CHATHAM 

proceeded to Bath, as we know from another letter dated 
August 19, 1758. She was restless, as on August 26th she 
was at Bristol. In all these letters there is not a word 
that betokens other than kindness and gratitude to her 
brother; as, for example, on August 19th she writes to Lady 
Suffolk : ' God grant that the public news may continue to 
be good, especially from Prince Ferdinand, for the sake of 
a person whose health and prosperity I wish more than I 
shall ever tell him.' A week afterwards she takes public 
occasion to rejoice at his triumphs by furnishing a bonfire 
and ten hogsheads of strong beer and all the music she could 
procure. On the other side, we read the letters which the 
busy statesman found time to write to her- breathing af- 
fection and solicitude. 

St. James's Square. Aug. io f/ *. 1758. 
Dear Sister, — I wait with much impatience to hear you are 
arrived well at Bath, and that you are lodged to your mind. I 
will not entertain any doubts, after having had the satisfaction 
of seeing you, that your progression to a perfect recovery will be 
sensible every Day, and as soon as you can bear a stronger 
nourishment, that Spirits, the concomitants of Strength, will 
return, as a part of the necessary regimen, solid nourishment 
for that busy craving Thing call'd Mind must have its place, and 
I know of no mental Alteratives (?) of power to renovate and 
brace up a sickly Constitution of Thought, but that mild and 
generous Philosophy which teaches us the true value of the 
World, and a rational firm religion, that anchors us safe in the 
confidence of another, but I will end my sermon and come to 
the affairs of the world I am so deeply immersed in. this day 
had brought us an account that our Troops effected their landing, 
with little Loss, y e 7th and 8th two Leagues from Cherbourgh, in 
the face of a pretty considerable Number, who gave some loose 
fires and run. I am infinitely anxious till we hear again, as I ex- 
pect something serious will ensue. I must not close my letter 
without telling you that the most particular enquiries after your 
health have been made by the Lady you sent a Card to, and I, 

96 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

very obligingly reprimanded for keeping your arrival a secret 
from Them. Lady Hester shares my Impatience to hear news 
of you, and all my sentiments for your health and happiness, 
our Love follows dear Mary, whose merits you must, to your 
great satisfaction, more and more feel every day. 

I am ever my Sister's most affectionate Brother 

W. Pitt. 

St. James's Square. Sept. y e \2 th . 1758. 

Dear Sister, — You have now try'd the Bristol waters long 
enough to make some judgement of their effects, and I have kept 
silence long enough for you to make perhaps a strange judgement 
of my manner of feeling for my friends, but feel I certainly do, 
my Dear Sister, for all that concerns your health and happiness, 
how much soever I have kept it for some weeks past a matter 
between me and my own conscience, without giving you the least 
hint of my truly affectionate sollicitude on your account. I am 
extremely inclin'd to believe Doctor Oliver judges rightly of the 
first principle of your disorders ; that it is Gout, which aided by 
the waters of Bath and proper nourishment may ripen into a 
salutary tho' painfull crisis, as I think myself that Languor or 
perturbation of Spirits are well exchanged for a degree of pain, 
I shall heartily wish you joy of such a revolution in the system 
of your Constitution, how can I have got so far in my paper, 
and not a word of the King of Kings whose last Glories transcend 
all the parts? the Modesty of H:P:Maj tys relation, his Silence of 
Himself, and entire attribution of the victory to Gen 1 Seidlitz, 
are of a mind as truly heroick as H. Majesty's taking a Colours 
in his own hand, when exhortations failed, and forcing a dis- 
ordered Infantery to follow Him or see Him perish, more Glory 
can not be won; but more decisive final consequence we still 
hope to hear, and languish for further letters from the Prussian 
army. My Love to Dear M rs Mary. 

I am ever most affec Iy Y rs 

W. Pitt. 

Then comes a letter referring apparently to the Battle 
of Hochkirch : 

97 



LORD CHATHAM 

Dear Sister, — I can not omit writing, tho' but a line, to give 
you the satisfaction of knowing that M r d'Escart will return to 
France in a very few days. I am very glad that it has been 
practicable to accomplish so soon a thing that will give pleasure 
to so many of your Friends, the news from Dresden to day is not 
very agreable, the King of Prussia's right wing attack'd sudenly 
at 4 in the morning y e 14th, put into disorder, Marshal Keith and 
Prince Francis of Brunswick kill'd but the King coming to the 
Right, the action was restored and the Austrians repulsed. His 
Prussian Majesty's Person so exposed that one trembles: his 
Horse shot, and a Page and Ecuyer wounded by his side, a 
second action seems inevitable : I hope every thing from it, as this 
Heroick Monarch's happy Genius never fails him when he wants 
it most. I have not a moment more, be assured of my con- 
stant wishes for your health and happiness. 

I am Dear Sister Your affectionate Brother 

Loves to Mary. W. Pitt. 

Oct. y e 24 th . 

Ann was now in London on a short visit, for the purpose 
of attending the Court ; but she had designs of her own 
which appear to be serious, but which give some evidence 
of the insanity which was always hovering over her. 

'I hear my Lord Bath,' she writes, November 10, 
1758, 'is here very lively, but I have not seen him, which 
I am very sorry for, because I want to offer myself to him. 
I am quite in earnest, and have set my heart upon it; so 
I beg seriously you will carry it in your mind and think if 
you could find any way to help me. Do not you think 
Lady Betty (Germaine) and Lord and Lady Vere would 
be ready to help me, if they knew how willing I am? But 
I leave this to your discretion, and repeat seriously that 
I am quite in earnest. He can want nothing but a com- 
panion that would like his company, and in my situation, 
I should not desire to make the bargain without that cir- 
cumstance. And though all I have been saying puts me 
in mind of some advertisements I have seen in the news- 

98 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

paper from gentlewomen in distress, I will not take that 
method; but I want to recollect whether you did not 
once tell me, as I think you did many years ago, that he 
spoke so well of me that he got anger for it at home, where 
I never was a favourite.' 1 

Never, surely, did a spinster of forty-eight breathe so 
frankly her aspirations towards a wealthy and avaricious 
septuagenarian. We may be sure that this freak of fancy 
was not confided to her brother. But he on his side had a 
favour to ask of her, on behalf of a puissant personage. 
Statesmen in those days had to pay their homage to the 
Court wherever they could find it, and Pitt, who was 
never loved by George II., could not afford to neglect 
the influence of Lady Yarmouth. At any rate, he did not, 
though apparently without success in his ultimate object, 
and so we find him attempting to neutralise, through 
Ann, the mischief which might ensue from Lady Betty 
Waldegrave's letters being attributed by the Court of 
France to the King's favourite. Lady Yarmouth was in 
danger of being compromised ! 

Ann thus describes the negotiation : ' If I had not 
happened to be sick, I should have been very much pleased 
with an express that was sent me to give me a commission 
that I liked to execute, because it relates to a person I am 
obliged to and have a regard for; it is my Lady Yarmouth 
who desires me, by my brother, to explain a very disagreeable 
mistake which has been made in France about a very fond 
letter, and mighty improper as to politics, which Lady 
Betty Waldegrave wrote to her husband, unsigned, and 
having desired the answer might be directed to Lady Y's 
lodging, they concluded, very absurdly, the letter came 
from her; and as it was intercepted, it was translated, 
shown, and commented very impertinently.' 

1 Lady Suffolk's Letters, ii. 251. 
99 



LORD CHATHAM 

St. James's Square. Nov. f h . 1758. 

Dear Sister, — I write to you at the desire of Lady Yarmouth, 
on an Incident of a particular nature, and which has given her 
Ladyship so much uneasiness that it will be a very agreeable 
office, if you can contribute, by a letter to some Lady of the 
Court at Versailles, to the clearing up of a very odd Qui pro 
Quo. The matter in question is as follows. Letters to England 
from our Army having been taken, there is amongst them one 
from Lady Betty Waldgrave to General Waldgrave unsign'd. 
the writer desires the General will direct his letters to Lady Yar- 
mouth at Kensington, on this ground the letter in question 
being attributed, in France, to Lady Yarmouth has drawn at- 
tention, been translated, and handed about, as she is inform'd, 
with some mirth at Versailles and Paris, this letter is return'd, 
by the channel of Selwyn's House, and Lady Yarmouth finds it 
to contain, not only the expressions of a loving wife to a Husband, 
but a strain of political reflections, together with observations on 
very high Personages in Europe, commanding Armies in Germany; 
all which Language cou'd not but bear a very prejudicial Com- 
ment, if really attributed to the Lady, by whose desire I now 
write to you. You are the best judge how to acquit yourself of 
the Commission you are desired to charge yourself with ; whether 
by writing to the Dutchess of Mirepoix or any other of your 
friends. I can only say, that I perceive Lady Yarmouth will 
think Herself obliged to you for such an intervention, in a matter 
of some Delicacy, and which might have many possible ill Con- 
sequences, if you shall write in the manner desir'd, and will 
send your letter directed to your Correspondent, under Cover to 
me, I will take care it shall go in Count Very's packet to Paris. 

I rejoice extremely my Dear Sister, at the account of your 
amendment in Spirits, since your late attack, keep the ground 
so hardly won, and ascend, by courage and perseverance that 
arduous steep, on the Summit of which, Health and Happiness, I 
trust, still wait you. I am lame in one foot, and much threatened 
with Gout for some days past; but I flatter myself that it may 
blow over, like an Autumnal ruffle, our Expeditions are, I fear, 
lame in both Feet. My Messenger is order'd to wait your full 
leisure. I am Dear Sister, Your most affectionate Brother 

W. Pitt. 
100 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

Ann appears to have been successful, and receives 
thanks both from William and the austere Lady Hester. 

Dear Sister, — I am desired by Lady Yarmouth to assure you 
of the sense she has of your good offices, which she was so good 
to accompany with the most obliging expression of regard for 
you, and with many wishes for your health. I shall be happy to 
receive a favourable account of your situation, and which I 
flatter myself is every day mending, and that by a Progression 
which will soon enable you to take air and exercise. I am just 
going to Hayes, for some hours recess, that I want much. 
I am ever Dear Sister Most afT ly Y rs 
Saturday morning. W. Pitt. 

St. James's Square Tuesday Nov. 14. 
Dear Madam, — If I had not for some time past found great 
inconvenience from writing I shou'd not have continued so long 
Silent where I always find so much pleasure in expressing my 
sentiments, but however great my indisposition is from my 
Situation to my present employment, I cou'd not refuse a com- 
mission which I had the honour to be charged with today from 
my Lady Yarmouth, as I am sure the Subject of it will be a great 
pleasure and Satisfaction to you. It was to desire I wou'd 
return you a thousand Thanks for your letters, and to assure 
you that she felt herself most extremely obliged to you for them, 
and for the trouble you had given yourself, with many other 
expressions of the manner in which she was sensible of your 
goodness in what you had done, and how very agreable it was 
to Her. I was very sorry to find by your account of yourself 
to M r Pitt that you had had another return of your bilious 
Complaint, but we Comfort our selves with the hope of its having 
produced the same salutary effects the Last did. We shall be 
impatient to have a confirmation of its having had so desirable 
a consequence. By Miss Mary's Last Letters both to her Brother 
and Me we have flattered ourselves with the pleasure of seeing 
Her for some days past, but as yet she has not appeared, which 
wou'd make us uneasy but that we conclude if her purpose of 
Leaving Bath the time she mention'd had been alter'd from any 
disagreable Circumstance she wou'd have apprised us of it. Our 
8 101 



LORD CHATHAM 

Nephew, Mr. Thos. Pitt, desires to have the permission and 
pleasure of conveying this to you, as he intends setting out for 
the Bath tomorrow in order to wait upon Sir Richard Lyttelton, 
whom I wish he may find better than by the reports which pre- 
vail, I fear he has any Chance of Doing. Your Brother continues 
as usual overwhelm'd with business, and not entirely free from 
some Notices of the Gout, but which yet I flatter myself will 
not increase to a fit. He begs his affectionate Compliments to 
you, and I that you wou'd forgive both the shortness and the 
faults of this Letter, and believe me equally however exprest 
Your very affectionate Sister and Obedient Servant 

Hes : Pitt. 

M r Pitt desires to assure you the Letters were the properest 
that cou'd be writ upon the occasion. 

Ann, as we learn from the preceding letter, returned to 
Bath at once. ' M r Thomas Pitt ' (Lord Camelford) brings 
it to her, and here makes her acquaintance : ' It was there ' 
(at Bath) 'in the year 1759 that I first connected that 
friendship with her which still leaves so many mixed sen- 
sations on my mind.' Ann, it may confidently be said, left 
mixed sensations on all minds. The next note announces 
the birth of the young William Pitt. 

Hayes. May y e 28 th . 1759. 
Dear Sister, — I have the satisfaction to acquaint you, of 
what you was so good to wish to hear; Lady Hester was safely 
delivered of a Boy this morning, after a labour rather severe, 
but she and the Child are, thank God, as well as can be. You 
will give us a very real pleasure by good accounts of your own 
health which we hope is much better for the journey alone, and 
that waters will not fail to be of great assistance towards a perfect 
recovery. I am 

Dear Sister Your most affectionate Brother, 

W. Pitt. 
I can't help mentioning to you the waters and Bath of Bux- 
ton: which for a languid perspiration and obstructions in the 
smaller vessels, have done wonders. 

102 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

Next comes a short letter from William, only notable 
from his anxiety about Squire Allworthy. 

St. James's Square. July 24th, 1759. 

Dear Sister, — Your letter on the subject of Mr. Allen's Health 
gave me, with the Pain of learning he had been ill, the Satis- 
faction of understanding that the attack was, in some degree 
over ; that to Lady Hester giving an account of the terrible nature 
of his complaint, having follow'd Her to Wotton, where she 
now is. 

I trust that the next accounts from Prior Park will be favour- 
able and that the best of men, who feels and relieves the most 
the sufferings of others, may not Himself suffer the severest of 
Pains. I learn with great satisfaction the considerable amend- 
ment you mention in your own Health, and the promising 
prospects of deriving much benefit from Tunbridge. I hope 
You will not let too much of this fine season for mineral waters 
pass, before you repair to Them, and that their effects, when 
you try them, will fully answer your own and your Friends 
expectation. 

I am Dear Sister Your most affectionate Brother, 

W. Pitt. 

if Lord Paulett be still at Bath, I beg my compliments to 
his Lordship. 

It is perhaps well, for the preservation of continuity, 
to print the following letter from Lady Hester to her 
sister-in-law : 

Tuesday. St. James's Square. Aug. 29 th . 
I am so much in Arrear to You, my Dear Madam, and upon 
so many accounts, that I don't know where to begin first to acquit 
my Self to You. I feel I want now most to justifie my self to 
you for not having before exprest how sensible I am to the various 
Marks I have received of your very obliging Attention upon all 
the Subjects that you knew wou'd give me the greatest pleasure. 
The Fact is that an unexpected Journey to Wotton, from which 
place I return'd but Last night, interfered with my intention of 

103 



LORD CHATHAM 

writing to You, and of returning you my sincerest thanks for 
the great Satisfaction your Letter gave me. It included every- 
thing that cou'd make it pleasing to Me, and renew'd all my 
own Joy for our Successes with Yours added to it, which was a 
great improvement of all I felt before, and particularly for 
Louisbourg, Dear, as you know so many ways. I am charmed 
with my rings, which are after an English Taste that I hope 
will be followed, and grow fashionable enough to encourage a 
Variety of Patterns. Last night brought a Large Package from 
Bath directed to Your Brother, and intended we guess for the 
Young Militia Man at Hayes. It contained besides a present 
for Miss Hetty, both which will be faithfully deliver'd this 
evening, and the sentiments they inspire shall be in due time 
communicated. In the Interval I believe I must apply to you 
my Dear Madam to assure the kind sender of my share of pleasure 
in the present. Miss Mary's Letter received Last night, gave 
a great deal of Satisfaction to both your Brother and Me by the 
account of Your Health, and the Progress You have made in a 
returning to a Diet of Solid Food, a sort of Sustenance so much 
more likely to restore and confirm your Strength and Spirits 
than any other. We are glad to find that Doctor Oliver has your 
approbation, and that he seems to reason with great sense and 
probability upon your case, and what it is likely to end in. the 
Gout is not a very desirable Thing, but only comparatively, 
where the constitution is not strong, for then there are many 
Disorders to which people are Liable that are much worse. I 
am vastly pleased that Our House has the honour of being ap- 
proved by you, and should be delighted if I cou'd be so happy 
as to receive You in it, and wish extremely that it was furnish'd 
and fit for Your reception, but I find Mr. Pitt thinks that it is 
not proper to have hired furniture put into it, as well as that 
you cou'd not be so conveniently accommodated in a House so 
circumstanced, as you will be in the very commodious Lodgings 
which Bath affords. We are meditating a journey to Hayes 
the moment Mr. Pitt returns from Kensington, which makes 
it impossible for me to say as much as I wish to You upon the 
different Subjects in this Letter, being obliged to give an account 
of my journey to the Friends I met at Wotton who are now 
disperst. May I beg you to give my Love to Miss Mary, and to 

104 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

say I hope she will admit what I have been saying as an excuse 
for my not acknowledging by this Post in a letter to Her what 
I have in my sentiments acknowledged ever since I heard from 
her, that I was indebted to her for the Prettiest, as well as the 
most Obliging, Letter in the World, besides her Bath Fairing 
which I value properly. I shall only now repeat my request 
that You will believe me Always my Dear Madam 
Your affectionate Sister and most Obedient Servant, 

H. Pitt. 

Mr. Pitt will endeavour to serve the Chevalier de Chaila as 
you desire. 

All so far had been harmonious enough. Unfortunately, 
there now occurred a second misunderstanding, to which 
the ensuing letters relate. It is best to give Lord Camel- 
ford's account, which, though mysterious enough, is all we 
have. ' Her Physicians advising her to discontinue the 
Waters for a short time to give trial to a course of med'cines, 
she determin'd to accompany me to London, to see some 
old friends after a long absence, and to transact certain 
business, and then to return to Bath. Fearing, however, 
that her unexpected arrival at her Lodgings in Leicester 
House might have objections, or that there might be 
difficulties in her lodging any where in London, she stop'd 
short at Sion at Ly. Holdernesse's, her particular friend, 
from whence she removed to Kensington to a house Mr. 
Cresset lent her. This Journey gave offence to her Brother, 
and occasion 'd their second quarrel. Instead of managing 
a temper too like his own, instead of yielding to her repeated 
request of seeing him, when with gentleness he might have 
explained his wishes to her and have persuaded to whatever 
he thought best for her or for himself, he satisfied himself 
with dark hints, imperious messages, and ambiguous 
menaces convey 'd thro' Ly. Hester and his Sister Mary, 
neither of whom were very happy in the arts of conciliation. 

105 



LORD CHATHAM 

Frightened, confounded, and at the same time exasperated 
by so strange a conduct, she tried to return to Bath, but 
her strength would not admit of her getting half way thro' 
the Journey. She return 'd to Kensington — she got medical 
advice — she saw a few of her old friends, who soon disproved 
the falsities that were every day propagated of her State 
of Health — by degrees she saw all her fears vanish — the 
World return to her and nobody flie from her but the 
Person from whom she expected her chief countenance and 
support. She sounded the Princess, and found she was at 
full liberty to live where she pleased, except that the 
former intimacy was at an end. She met her Brother 
accidentally at Ly. Yarmouth's, he kiss'd her on both sides 
with the affectation of the warmest affection; whilst he 
refused to visit her and his whole family were hostile to 
her in the cruelest manner.' 

The whole affair is obscure, and is not elucidated by the 
letters of Pitt and his wife which follow. Lady Hester is 
civil and kind enough, though evidently forbidden to visit 
T>r receive her sister-in-law. But what Pitt means by 
his allusion to 'desultory jaunts,' and 'hovering about 
London,' and conduct 'too imprudent and restless or as 
too mysterious ' for him to be connected with it, we cannot 
now conjecture. What harm a spinster of forty-eight 
could do by staying with Lady Holdernesse at Sion, and 
thence moving to Kensington, and being undecided as 
to her plans, it is not easy to determine. It is possible, 
on considering the whole affair, Ann's own temperate reply, 
and all that followed, that Pitt knew that his sister was 
seeking a pension, for which purpose she had gone to Sion 
and to Kensington (for Lady Holdernesse was the wife of 
a Secretary of State, and Cresset was a man of influence), 
and desirous that his name should not be connected with the 
pension list at this moment of unrivalled popularity and 

106 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

power, he was anxious to have no communication with her. 
There is a still more probable explanation of Pitt's annoy- 
ance with his sister's behaviour. We have seen that Lord 
Camelf ord speaks of the ' falsities that were every day prop- 
agated about her state of health.' In a letter soon to 
follow she herself speaks of her stay in France 'before my 
spirits were so much disordered as they have been since.' 
Some years afterwards, Horace Walpole wrote of her that 
she had at times been out of her senses. It seems possible, 
then, that one of these attacks had taken place at Bath, and 
that she had broken loose from constraint and come up to 
London, which would revive the gossip about her condition, 
and so cause annoyance to her brother, who thought that 
peremptoriness was the only method of getting her back 
again to Bath. If this were so, he acted wisely, as she 
appears to have returned to Bath at once. This last 
conjecture seems the more probable explanation. In any 
case the circumstances of the people and the times were 
full of electricity. Pitt was busy, gouty and irritable; 
Bute was much above the horizon. Ann was eccentric, 
wilful, and wayward. Soon afterwards, she had a pension, 
which annoyed her brother. This is all that we can be said 
to know. We do not even know the date of this episode. 

From Lady Hester Pitt. 

It is my Dear Madam extremely unfortunate that from 
different circumstances which have interpos'd themselves, I 
have not had it in my power to have the pleasure of seeing you 
since your arrival in the neighbourhood of London, and I am 
quite concern'd that by Your Brother's business I am so cir- 
cumstanced today, as to make it impossible for me to receive 
that Satisfaction. There is to be a meeting of the Cabinet here 
this Evening, which Always engrosses my Apartment and 
banishes me to other quarters. We are but just arrived from 
the Country, which I think has done your Brother good. He 

107 



LORD CHATHAM 

desires I wou'd assure you of his affectionate Compliments, and 
Let you know that his present Pressure of business is so great 
that it does not leave him the Command of a quarter of an hour 
of his time, so as to be able to assure himself beforehand of the 
pleasure of seeing any friend, therefore under that uncertainty, 
and fearing he may miss of the Satisfaction of meeting You, he 
desires thro' me to wish you a safe return to Bath, so much the 
best place, He is perfectly convinced, for Your Health. We 
are both very glad to hear you have had a confirmation from 
Doctor Pitt of the efficacy you may expect to find in those waters 
for your Complaints. I must not end my Note without ex- 
pressing how much I was flattered by your remembrance of Little 
Hetty, tho' I trust Miss Mary did not forget me upon that sub- 
ject, no more than on that of my real Concern for its being 
impossible for me to wait upon You, and say for myself how 
much I feel obliged to You for your kind Letter and message. 
The Compliments of the season attend You my Dear Madam 
with many good wishes. 

St. James's Square. Tuesday. 

St. James's Square. Monday. Jan. i$th. 

Dear Madam, — Mr. Pitt is this moment come to Town, and 
so overwhelm 'd with business, that it is quite impossible for Him 
to write a word to You Himself, in answer to your Note which 
he has just received. He is very sorry to find you are ill, and 
wishes me to tell you that you have mistaken Him in thinking 
he meant to express any desire of His as to your Going, or Staying, 
which he always meant to Leave to your own Decision, but only 
to offer you his opinion, and never proposes to take upon Him 
to give you any further Advice with regard to the place of Your 
residence, which you have all right independent of any thing 
with respect to Him to determine as You please for Yourself. 
I am extremely concern 'd to hear your disorder is increased so 
much as to have made your return to Kensington necessary, as 
I fear your Situation There must be very uncomfortable and 
Disagreeable, without Servants, or any of those Conveniences, 
which are so particularly of Consequence when any body is ill. 
I hope most sincerely to have the pleasure of hearing you are 

108 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

better, and Able to prosecute what ever May be thought best 
for Your Health, being very truly Dear Madam 

Your Most Affectionate and Most Obed* 

H. Pitt. 

Friday Morning. 
Dear Sister, — I desire to assure you that all Idea of Quarrel 
or unkindness, (words I am griev'd to find you cou'd employ) 
was never farther from my mind than during your stay in this 
neighbourhood, on the Contrary, my Dear Sister, nothing but 
kindness and regard to your Good, on the whole, has made me 
judge it necessary that we should not meet during the Contin- 
uance you think fit to give to an excursion so unexpected, and 
so hurtfull to you. I beg my Dear Sister not to mistake my 
wishes to see Her set down, for a time, quiet and collected within 
her own Resources of Patience and fortitude, (merely as being 
best and the only fit thing for Herself) so very widely as to 
suppose, that my Situation as a Publick Person, is any way 
concern 'd in her residing in one Place or another, all I mean 
is, that, for your own sake, you shou'd abstain from all desultory 
jaunts, such as the present, the hearing of you all at once, at 
Sion; next at Kensington, then every day going, and now not 
yet gone, certainly carries an appearance disadvantageous to 
you in this view; I have refused myself the pleasure of seeing 
You; as considering your journey and hovering about London, 
as too imprudent and restless, or as too mysterious, for me not 
to discourage such a conduct, by remaining unmixt with it. 
this is the only cause of my not seeing you, nor can I give you a 
more real proof of my affectionate regard for your welfare than 
by thus refusing myself a great pleasure, and, I fear, giving you a 
Pain. I offer you no Advice, as to the choice of your residence. 
I am persuaded you want none; you have a right and are well 
able to judge for yourself on this point, but if you will not fix 
somewhere You are undone. I am sorry to be forc'd to say this 
much ; but saying less I should cease to be with truest affection 
Dear Sister 

Ever Yrs 

W. Pitt. 
109 



LORD CHATHAM 

Ann Pitt to her Brother. 

Dear Brother, — I am going to set out to return to Bath, but 
as the letter I received from you yesterday leaves me in great 
anxiety and perplexity of mind, I can not set out without assuring 
you, as I do with the most exact truth, that there was no mistery 
in my journey here, nor no purpose but the relief I proposed to 
my mind. If I had known before I left the Bath that you dis- 
approved of my leaving that place at this time, or of my coming 
to Town, I wou'd not have done as I have done, and wou'd not 
even have come near it, tho' the advice given me at Oxford with 
regard to my health, made me desire to make use of the interval 
in which I was order'd not to try the waters again, to have the 
pleasure and satisfaction of seeing You and some of my friends 
and as I hoped that satisfaction from You in the first place, I 
will not dissemble that I am very much disappointed and mor- 
tified in not having seen you, but as the hurry of important 
business you are in, and the relief necessary to make you go 
through it, made it possible for me not to interpret your not 
seeing me as a mark of unkindness, I never used the word (the 
word) but to guard against other people using it, upon a circum- 
stance which I thought they had nothing to do with. 

When I writ you word from the Bath that I had thoughts 
of coming to Town for Christmas, I desir'd nothing so much as 
to do what was most proper according to my situation, and 
consequently to have your advice, which I told you, very sincerely 
I wished to be guided by preferably to every other consideration, 
You best know how I am to attain the end I have steadily desired 
for Years, as you know I writ you word from France (before 
my spirits were so much disorder'd as they have been since) that 
I desired nothing as much as a safe and honourable retreat, 
that wou'd leave me the enjoyment of my Friends, without 
which help and suport I find by a painfull experience that it 
is impossible for me to suport myself. I beg leave to trouble 
you with my compliments to Lady Hester, and my wishes for 
the happiness of you both, and of all the little family that belong 
to you. I am D B r &c. 

This undated note appears to belong to the same 
time as the preceding ones, and tends to confirm the 

no 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

hypothesis that it was Ann's mental condition that gave rise 
to anxiety. 

From Lady Hester Pitt. 

Dear Madam, — Having informed Mr. Pitt, who is this mo- 
ment come home, that you intend going to the Lodgings in Lisle 
Street, He wou'd not set down to dinner without desiring me to 
let you know from Him that this intention of Yours gives him the 
greatest surprise and not Less concern for Your sake, being un- 
alterably persuaded that Retreat is the only right Thing for your 
Health, Welfare, and Happiness, and that Bath in Your present 
state seems to be the fittest Place. 

Si. James's Square Wednesday past four o'clock. 

We now come to the famous affair of the pension. Ann 
has evidently written to ask her brother's interest for a 
pension. He replies that on such a subject he would rather 
not speak, much less write to her, and gives her plainly to 
understand that he washes his hands of the whole business. 
She now turned to Bute. 'Having lost, therefore,' writes 
Camelford, 'all the hopes she had founded on her brother's 
friendship, which now turned to open enmity, she tried the 
generosity of L d Bute upon the King's succession, who, not 
unwilling to give M r Pitt a sensible mortification in the 
shape of a civility, procured for her a pension that was no 
small comfort in addition to her slender income, which was 
afterwards again augmented to ^1000 p. a., at the instance 
of her friend M. de Nivernois, upon the peace.' 

Dear Sister, — I hoped long before now to have been able to 
call on you, and in that hope have delayed answering a letter on 
a subject so very nice and particular, that I cou'd, with difficulty 
and but imperfectly, enter into it even in conversation. I am 
sure I need not say to one of your knowledge of the world, that 
explaining of Situations is not a small Affair, at any time, and in 
the present moment I dare say You are too reasonable to wish me 
to do it. In this state I have only to assure you of my sincerest 

in 



LORD CHATHAM 

wishes for your advantage and happiness, and that I shall con- 
sider any good that arrives to you as done to myself, which I shall 
be ready to acknowledge as such : but having never been a Sol- 
licitor of favours, upon any occasion, how can I become so now 
without contradicting the whole tenour of my Life? I think there 
is no foundation for your apprehensions of anything distressfull 
being intended, and I hope you will not attribute, what I have 
said to any motive that may give you uneasiness, being very 
truely 

Dear Sister Your affectionate Brother 
Nov. 24: 1760. W. Pitt. 

After the letter in which Pitt sheers off from the pension, 
there was evidently an announcement from Ann that it had 
been granted to her on the recommendation of Lord Bute. 
This is lost. But we have Pitt's unpleasing congratulation. 
This was the note which Ann was with difficulty restrained 
from returning to Pitt, having altered it to suit the circum- 
stances of the case, when Pitt's wife was granted a much 
larger pension. 

Dear Sister, — Accept sincere felicitations from Lady Hester 
and me on the Event you have just communicated, on your 
account, I rejoice at an addition of income so agreeable to your 
turn of life, whatever repugnancy I find, at the same time, to see 
my Name placed on the Pensions of Ireland, unmixt as I am in 
this whole transaction, I will not doubt that you will take care to 
have it thoroughly understood, long may you live in health to 
enjoy the comforts and happiness which you tell me you owe 
to the King, singly through the intercession of Lord Bute, and 
to feel the pleasing sentiments of such an obligation. 

I am Dear Sister Your most affectionate Brother 
Tuesday Dec. 30* 1760. W. Pitt. 

Then follows Ann's reply, which may be judged not 
unconciliatory when her fierce temperament is taken into 
consideration. She elaborately and almost humbly vindi- 
cates her pension against her brother's sarcastic strictures. 

112 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

Dear Brother, — I must trouble you again, not only to return 
my thanks to Lady Hester and yourself, for your obliging felicita- 
tions, But as I have the mortification of finding, that for some 
reasons which I can not judge of, You feel a repugnancy to the 
mark of favour I have had the honour to receive, and desire — it 
may be thoroughly understood that you had no share in the 
transaction — I ought to make you easy, by assuring you, as I do, 
that so far as I think proper to communicate an event, which will 
not naturally be very publick, I will take care to explain the 
truth, by which it will appear that you are no way concern 'd in it, 
and that it has no sort of relation to your Situation as Minister, 
since my request was first made to the Princess many years ago, as 
Her Royal Highnesses Servant, as I am pretty sure I explained 
to you in a letter from France, and repeated to you at my return, 
as the foundation of my hopes of obtaining the Princesses appro- 
bation for any establishment you might have procured for me. 
And tho' the Provision I have been so happy to obtain from His 
Majesty's Bounty is of the utmost importance to me and answers 
every wish I cou'd form with regard to my income, yet when I 
was allow'd to say how much wou'd make me easy, I fix'd it at a 
sum, which I flatter myself will not be thought exorbitant, or 
appear as if I had wanted to avail myself of the weight of your 
credit, or the merit of your services to obtain it. 

As to your objection to your Names (sic) being upon the Irish 
Pensions, I do not believe that any mistake can be made, from 
mine being there. And as to myself, I very sincerely think it an 
honour that is very flattering to me, to have received so precious 
a mark of the Royal favour, and to have my Name upon the same 
List not only with some of the highest and the most deserving 
persons in England, but even with some of the greatest and most 
glorious names in Europe. If I have tired you with a longer letter 
than I intended, I have been lead (sic) into it, by the sincere de- 
sire I have, that an advantage so very essential to the ease and 
comfort of the remainder of a Life, which has not hitherto been 
very happy, shou'd not be a cause of uneasiness to You. I am 

Alas for the f reakf ul fate which plays with poor humanity 
and its concerns! The next letter announces another pen- 
sion, not to Ann, but to Pitt's wife. So soon after the other 

113 



LORD CHATHAM 

correspondence, not ten months ! No wonder that Ann was 
tempted to the vengeance that has been described. Even 
though she refrained we may imagine her unrestrained 
scoffs and her bitter laughter. 

Dear Madam, — I was out of Town Yesterday, or otherwise I 
shou'd have had the pleasure of informing You that His Majesty 
has been Graciously pleas 'd to confer the Dignity of Peerage on 
Your Brother's Family, by creating Me Baroness of Chatham 
with Limitation to our Sons. The King has been farther pleas 'd 
to make a Grant of Three Thousand Pounds a Year to Mr. Pitt 
for his own Life, Mine, and our Eldest Son's in consideration of 
Mr. Pitt's Services, We do not doubt of the Share You will take 
in these Gracious Marks of his Majesties Royal Approbation and 
Goodness. 

I am Dear Madam Your most Obedient Servant 

Hes: Pitt. 
Sunday Morning 

Some four years afterwards Ann received this short note, 
which shows that there was no rupture of relations; and the 
tone indeed is cordial for the period, when the expression of 
the warmest affection was far from gushing. 

Burton-Pynsent Aug. y e i st 1765. 
I am extremely obliged to you, Dear Sister, for the trouble 
you are so good to take of writing to enquire after my health, 
which I found mend on the journey and by change of air. I 
still continue lame, but have left off one Crutch, which is no 
small advance; tho' with only one Wing my flights, you will 
imagine, are as yet very short: the Country of Somersetshire 
is beautifull and tempts much to extend them. I hope your 
health is much better and that you have found the way to 
subdue all your complaints, or at least to reduce them within 
such bounds, as leave your life comfortable and agreeable. 
Lady Chatham desires to present her compliments to you. 
I am Dear Sister Your affectionate Brother 

William Pitt. 
114 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

And now there come the last sad words, the last sign of 
life that William gives to Ann. It is not without signifi- 
cance that even at this period of prostration he bids his wife 
tell Ann that his official life is ended. It does not appear 
that there had ever been or was ever to be any formal 
reconciliation between them. But through all the gusts and 
squalls and storms that had troubled their intercourse an 
underlying tenderness had survived. 

Hayes. Oct. 2i s/ . 1768. 
Madam, — The very weak and broken state of my Lord's 
health having reduced him to the necessity of supplicating the 
King to grant him the permission to resign the Privy Seal, he 
has desir'd I wou'd communicate this Step to You. 
I am Madam, Your most Obedient Humble Servant 

H. Chatham. 

About this time (1768) she took up her abode at Ken- 
sington Gravel Pits, in the region of Notting Hill, 'where 
out of a very ugly odd house and a flat piece of ground 
with a little dirty pond in the middle of it, she has made a 
very pretty place; she says she has " hurt her understand- 
ing" in trying to make it so.' 1 Before that time she seems 
to have lived for a while at Twickenham; at least Horace 
Walpole speaks of her as a close neighbour. Being fairly 
launched as a pensioner, she throve on the system, and 
eventually accumulated a treble allowance; this Bute pen- 
sion, another procured by M. de Nivernois, and another, 
mentioned by Horace Walpole in a letter of Nov. 25, 1764, 
which must have raised her whole income from this source 
to some 1 500/. a year. On this she entertained, and frolicked, 
and danced. We hear of her choice but miniature balls, 
and her band of French horns, which Horace Walpole 
enjoyed and described. But her intercourse with William, 

1 Delany, iv. 156. 
"5 



LORD CHATHAM 

once so bright and genial, was ended, and that is all with 
which we are here concerned. A frigid letter or two 
counted as nothing in a connection which had once been 
as intimate as it was delightful. 

Ann went on living at Kensington a somewhat frivolous 
life so far as we know anything about it, in intimate rela- 
tions with Horace Walpole and his society. But in 1774 
she went abroad, under the auspices of the Butes, to Italy, 
to Pisa and elsewhere. Then came her brother's sudden 
death. Though she had been so long aloof from him, the 
shock finally shattered her reason, which, it would appear, 
had already given cause for apprehension. Chatham died 
May 11, 1778. She soon returned to England, and in the 
October of that year Horace Walpole writes that she is 'in 
a very wild way, and they think must be confined. ' 1 In the 
following May he announces that she is actually under 
restraint. 2 There is a letter at Chevening from her to her 
niece, Lady Mahon, dated 'Burnham, May 9, 1779,' which 
betrays her distraught condition. Burnham was probably 
that 'one of Dr. Duffell's houses' to which she had been 
removed. On Feb. 9, 1781, she dies, still in confinement. 
Lady Bute, it should be noted, was kind and attentive to 
the end. 3 

' She was in Italy at the time of his (Chatham's) death,' 
writes Lord Camelford, who was probably there too. ' I can 
bear witness that the grief she felt at the reflection of his 
having died without a reconciliation with her made such an 
impression of tenderness on her mind that not only oblit- 
erated all remembrance of his unkindness, but recoiled 
upon herself, as if she had been the offending party, and 
doubtless contributed greatly to the melancholy state in 
which she died.' 

1 Walpole to Mann, Oct. 30, 1778. 

s lb. May 9, 1779. * Delany, v. 403-5. 

116 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

Horace Walpole, who had come to hate all Pitts, con- 
firms this in his sardonic way. ' Did I tell you that M rs 
Ann Pitt is returned and acts great grief for her broth- 
er ? ' and he goes on to say that Camelf ord himself gave 
a little into that mummery, even to me ; forgetting 
how much I must remember of his aversion to his 
uncle. ' 

There were perhaps few genuine tears save those of wife 
and children shed over the grave of the grim, disconcerting 
old statesman, for men of his type are beyond friendship: 
they inspire awe, not affection; they deal with masses, not 
with individuals; they have followers, admirers, and an 
envious host of enemies, rarely a friend. But Ann had no 
reason to feign grief or self-reproach. She had lost her first 
love, her only love, the love of her life. It is probable that 
the brother and sister had understood each other through- 
out in their quick-kindling, petulant way. 'My brother, 
who has always seemed to guess and understand all I felt of 
every kind,' she wrote in 1757 J 1 a sentence which is a clue to 
all. The memory of childhood, the glad sympathies of 
youth, the impressions received when their characters were 
plastic and fresh, the habit of close intimacy for the score of 
years during which intimacy was possible for him, all these 
contributed to form a bond which survived the skirmishes 
and collisions of their later lives. Two persons of highly 
charged temperament, and of natures too much akin, who 
understood each other, respected each other, and perhaps 
secretly enjoyed each other's ebullitions, such were Ann and 
William after they separated in 1746. Their long affection 
is interesting if only that it seemed impossible that two such 
characters should agree even for a time. And therefore, 
though the narrative of this episode has swollen beyond 
all limit and proportion, the space is not lost, for it is 

1 Lady Suffolk's Letters, ii. 234. 
9 117 



LORD CHATHAM 

invaluable to the student of Pitt's career. It lights up 
the only expressed tenderness in his life, it is the one 
relief to his sombre nature, it is the sole record that 
we have of the unbending of that grim and stately 
figure. 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 



CHAPTER V 

IN 1734 there had been a fiercely contested General Elec- 
tion, and Thomas Pitt had been returned for both 
Okehampton and Old Sarum. He elected to sit for Oke- 
hampton, and nominated his brother, William, together 
with his brother-in-law, Nedham, for the other borough. 
So, on February 18th, 1735, William was returned Member 
for the notorious borough of Old Sarum; an area of about 
sixty acres of ploughed land, on which had once stood the 
old city of Salisbury, but which no longer contained a single 
house or a single resident. The electorate consisted of seven 
votes. When an election took place the returning officer 
brought with him a tent, under which the necessary business 
was transacted. 1 

To such a constituency it was superfluous, and indeed 
impossible, to offer an election address, or an exposition of 
policy. But William's politics could not be other than 
those of his brother and nominator, though it would seem 
that Thomas conformed to William rather than William 
to Thomas. We have seen some indications in his letters 
to Ann that Thomas had been favourable to Sir Robert 
Walpole, and that so late as November, 1734. But it 
seems probable that William, who was united in private 



1 Porritt's Unreformed House of Commons, i. 35. T. Mozley when the 
nineteenth century was well advanced saw the constituency of Old Sarum in the 
person of ' a bright looking old fellow with a full rubicund face and a profusion 
of white hair.' Reminiscences ii. 13. 

1 19 



LORD CHATHAM 

friendship with Lyttelton and the Grenvilles, was drawn 
to them by political sympathy as well, and was thus in 
agreement with the fiercest section of the Opposition. By 
the time that William was elected, Thomas, who was con- 
nected with the same group by marriage, must also have 
thrown in his political lot with it, or he would not have 
nominated his brother. For William, though only a cornet 
of horse, was known to be an enemy, and a redoubtable 
enemy, to the Minister. On this point we have clear 
evidence in a remarkable statement by Lord Camelford, 
which will be quoted later. 

William's political opinions were then, we may safely 
suppose, the result of family connection, for through his 
brother and his own friendships he was closely united with 
that band of politicians who met and caballed at Stowe, the 
stately residence of Lord Cobham. There he was a visitor 
for the first time this year (1735). His stay lasted not less 
than four months, from the beginning of July to the end of 
October. He could scarcely have remained so long without 
being enrolled in this small but important group, even had 
he not been enlisted already. But he was probably a recruit 
before his visit began. His brother, as we have seen, had 
married Christian Lyttelton, Cobham 's niece; George, after- 
wards Lord Lyttelton, was her brother, and Cobham 's 
nephew, as well as William's intimate friend; Richard and 
George Grenville, the first of whom is better known as Lord 
Temple, and the second as a laborious but intolerable prime 
minister, were Cobham 's nephews; Richard, indeed, was his 
heir. A family connection was thus formed, which, at first 
held up to ridicule under the nickname of ' Cobham 's cubs,' 
or 'The Cousins,' or 'The Boy Patriots,' was to be for the 
next thirty years a notable factor in political history, and a 
sinister element in Pitt's career. 

So it may be well here to turn aside for a moment to 

120 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

consider these Grenvilles, who exercised so singular and 
baleful an influence on Pitt, and indeed on public affairs 
in general. For from the moment that Pitt became their 
brother-in-law, he was adopted as one of the brotherhood 
and choked in their embraces. From this mortal entangle- 
ment he emancipated himself too late. It was then patent * 
how different his career would have been had he had a man 
of common-sense at his elbow, or at least an unselfish ad- 
viser. George Grenville, however, complained on his side 
that the connection had been fatal to the peace and happi- 
ness of the Grenvilles. 1 

Who was the chief of this combination? Richard 
Temple, Viscount Cobham, best remembered as the 'brave 
Cobham' to whom Pope addressed his first Epistle and as 
the founder of the dynasty and palace of Stowe, was not 
merely a soldier who had served with distinction under 
Marlborough, but a fortunate courtier on whom the House 
of Hanover had heaped constant and signal honours. He 
was created first a Baron, then a Viscount, Constable of 
Windsor Castle, Governor of Jersey, a Privy Councillor, 
Colonel of the First Dragoons, and was afterwards to 
become a Field Marshal and Colonel of the Horse Guards. 
He had, hints Shelburne, some of the Shandean humour 
of Marlborough's veterans, but his portrait shows a keen, 
refined, perhaps sensitive countenance; he was also some- 
thing of a bashaw. 3 Sated with military honours, and 
always a staunch Whig, he had now taken to conspicuous 
politics and splendour; politics exacerbated by a personal 
slight, and splendour displayed in sumptuous hospitality, 
princely buildings, and lavish magnificence of gardens. 
These, laid out under the supervision of Lancelot Brown, 
extended at last to not less than four hundred acres. Here 
he erected pavilions and shrines in the fashion of those 

> Grenville Papers, i. 423- 2 Ib ' l 423 ~ 5- 



121 



LORD CHATHAM 

times; the most daring of which was one to commemorate 
his friendships, with which politics had made sad havoc 
before the temple was completed. Here he kept open house 
in the spacious and genial fashion of that time, and enter- 
tained Pope, Congreve, Bolingbroke, Pulteney, the wits as 
well as the princes of the day. From these pleasing cares 
he had recently been diverted by one of those needless 
affronts which seem so inconsistent with the robust and 
genial character of Walpole, but to the infliction of which 
Walpole was singularly prone. On account of his oppo- 
sition to the Excise Bill, Cobham had been deprived of 
his regiment, the same, by-the-bye, in which Pitt was a 
subaltern. Stung to political ardour by this insult, he had 
begun to form a faction of violent opposition, of which 
his nephews and their friends were the nucleus. Thus 
began that formidable influence which had its home and 
source at Stowe for near a century afterwards, and which 
for three generations patiently and persistently pursued the 
ducal coronet which was the darling object of its successive 
chiefs. 

Cobham, then, founded the family, and, so long as he 
lived, directed their operations, with too much perhaps of 
the spirit of a martinet. When he died his fortune and 
title passed to his sister, afterwards, as we shall see, Countess 
Temple in her own right, the mother of the Grenvilles 
with whom we are concerned. 

There were originally five Grenville brothers: Richard, 
George, James, Henry, and Thomas. Three of these, 
however, are outside our limits. Thomas, a naval officer 
of signal promise, was killed in action off Cape Finisterre 
in May, 1747. James and Henry were cyphers, not ill 
provided for at the public charge. Both seem to have 
broken loose at one time from the tyranny of the brother- 
hood : James at first siding with Richard against George in 

122 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

1 761; and Henry, whom we find Richard anxious, on 
opposite grounds it is to be presumed, to oust from the 
representation of Buckingham in 1774. James, who, says 
Horace Walpole, 'had all the defects of his brothers and 
had turned them to the best account,' was Deputy Pay- 
master to Pitt; and Henry was a popular Governor of 
Barbadoes, as well as Ambassador at Constantinople for 
four years, after which both subsided into the blameless 
occupation of various sinecures. 

Never, indeed, was family so well provided for during 
an entire century as the Temple-Grenvilles. Although 
the system by which the aristocracy lived on the country 
was not carried nearly as far in Great Britain as in the 
France of the fourteenth Louis and his successor, yet it 
had no inconsiderable hold. Even the austere George, 
though averse in Burke's expressive language to 'the low, 
pimping politics of a Court,' did not disdain, when Prime 
Minister, to hurry to the King to announce the death of 
Lord Macclesfield and secure for his son, afterwards Marquis 
of Buckingham, the reversion of the Irish Tellership of the 
Exchequer thus vacated; 1 nor, a few months later, to obtain 
the grant of a lighthouse as a provision for his younger 
children. 2 The Tellership, held as it was under the uni- 
formed conditions, was a place of vast emolument; it is not 
now easy to compute the amount. 3 Nor is it necessary for 
the purpose of this book to follow up these details. Cobbett 
reckoned from returns furnished to the House of Commons 
that this Lord Buckingham and his brother Thomas, 
the sons of George Grenville, had in half a century drawn 
700,000/. of public money, and William, another brother, 
something like 200,000/. more. These figures, of course, 
are open to dispute, but they indicate at least that the 

•Grenville Papers, ii. 496. 2 lb. ii. 512. 

' Lord Dundonald in his 'Autobiography' says that it produced 20,693/. P- a - 

123 



LORD CHATHAM 

revenues from public money of this family of sinecurists 
must have been enormous. Of English families the Gren- 
villes were in this particular line easily the first. Had all 
sinecurists, it may be said in passing, spent their money 
like the younger Thomas, who returned far more than he 
received by bequeathing his matchless library to the nation, 
the public conscience would have been much more tender 
towards them. 

Nor was it need that drove them thus to live upon the 
public, for the private wealth of the family was command- 
ing; it was the basis of their power. Richard by the death 
of his mother was said to have become the richest subject 
in England. 1 And, as time went on, his possessions swelled 
and swelled. The estates of Bubb 2 devolved upon him. 
Heiresses brought their fortunes. There seemed no end 
to this prosperity, and it was all utilised steadily and 
ceaselessly to extend the political influence of the family. 

So all the brothers, even the sailor Thomas, were 
brought into the House of Commons; and, with their con- 
nections and their discipline, so long as this was preserved, 
formed a redoubtable political force. They were not only 
a brotherhood but a confraternity. What is really admir- 
able indeed is the pertinacity and concentration of this 
strange, dogged race, and their devotion, indeed subjection, 
to their chief; they were a political Company of Jesus. 
Their objects were not exalted, but from generation to gen- 
eration, with a patience little less than Chinese, they pur- 
sued and ultimately attained what they desired. They 
were of course unpopular, because their scheme was too 
obvious; but they knew the value of popularity, and at- 
tempted it with pompous and crowded entertainments. 

1 Dickins and Stanton 'An Eighteenth Century Correspondence,' 193. 

2 It seems best to call this worthy, who assumed the name of Dodington, 
by his patronymic; for it is his own name, and the most appropriate. 

124 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

They were not brilliant; but in every generation they had 
a man of sufficient ability, two prime ministers among them, 
to further their cause. They built, no doubt, on inade- 
quate foundations, but these lasted just long enough to 
enable the structure to be crowned. It is a singular story ; 
there is nothing like it in the history of England ; it resem- 
bles rather the persistent annals of the hive. 

The career of Pitt is concerned with only two of these 
Grenvilles, Richard and George. These two men had this 
at least in common, an amazing opinion of themselves. 
They were in their own estimation as good as or better 
than any one else. They resented the slightest idea of any 
disparity between themselves and Pitt. On what this pro- 
digious estimate was founded we shall never know; we can 
only conjecture that it was the combination of fortune 
and family with some ability that made them deem their 
position at least equal to his. When Pitt had raised Britain 
from abasement to the first position in the world, when he 
was indisputably the greatest orator and the greatest power 
in the country, the Grenvilles considered themselves at the 
least as Pitt's equals, and him as only one and not the first 
of a triumvirate. In 1769, when Pitt was reconciled to 
them, Temple trumpeted the 'union of the three brothers' 
as the greatest fact in contemporary history. As the 
alliance of a man of genius with great parliamentary influ- 
ence and powers of intrigue it was undoubtedly a political 
fact of note. But any disparity between the three person- 
alities never occurs to Temple. In 1766, he writes: 'If a 
■ lead of superiority was claimed (on the part of Pitt) it was 
' rejected on my part with an assertion of my pretensions to 
'an equality.' And again: 'I claimed an equality, and 
have no idea of yielding to him .... a superiority which 
I think it would be unbecoming in me to give.' Poor 
forgotten Temple! With such superb scorn did he reject 

125 



LORD CHATHAM 

the offer of the First Lordship of the Treasury, with the 
nomination of the Chancellorship of the Exchequer and the 
whole Board of Treasury, when offered by the first man in 
Europe. An hallucination of the same kind was observed 
in the brothers of Napoleon. But in that case it was only 
noted by cynical contemporaries, in this it was proclaimed 
on the housetops. 

Of Richard, the eldest, who became, as will be seen, 
Earl Temple, a competent and laborious critic has said 
that he was one of the ' most straightforward, honest, and 
honourable men of his age.' The age, no doubt, was not 
famous for public men of this type; but it was not so 
barren as this judgment would imply. And indeed it is 
difficult to discern the grounds on which it is based. To 
the ordinary student Temple, we imagine, will always 
appear a selfish and tortuous intriguer, who hoped to 
utilise his brother-in-law's genius and popularity for prac- 
tical objects of his own. But he had other resources of 
a more questionable kind. He delighted in the subter- 
ranean and the obscure. 'This malignant man,' says 
Horace Walpole with truth and point, 'worked in the 
mines of successive factions for over thirty years together. ' 
He was in constant communication with Wilkes, whom 
he supplied with funds. He was an active pamphleteer. 
So well were his methods understood that he acquired 
the dubious honour of a candidature for the authorship 
of Junius. It is almost certain at any rate that he was one 
of the few confidants of that remarkable secret. But his 
wealth and strategy and borough power were all concen- 
trated on selfish and personal objects. As head of the 
Grenvilles, his design was that the Grenvilles and their 
connections and all other influences that he could bring to 
bear should co-operate for the elevation of the family in 
the person of its chief. For this purpose his brother-in-law, 

126 



\ 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 



Pitt, was a priceless asset. But all the family had to serve. 
All of them were put into the House of Commons ; and, it 
may be added, into the Privy Council, except Thomas, the 
sailor, who was prematurely removed by death. George, 
who under Pitt and Temple only enjoyed subordinate office, 
was for a time lured from the family allegiance by Bute 
with the offer of a Secretaryship of State and the reversion 
of the headship. But George himself was eventually 
brought into line. 

Temple's aims were simple and material; from the 
first moment that we discern him he is pursuing them 
with persistent but intemperate ardour. Hardly was 
Cobham's body cold, Cobham, his uncle and benefactor, 
to whom he owed everything, when we find Temple urging 
that his mother, Cobham's sister and heiress, should be 
made a Countess in her own right, with descent, of course, 
to himself. Cobham died on September 13th; on Septem- 
ber 28th Temple applied for this title. Even Newcastle, 
the most hardened of political jobbers, was shocked at his 
precipitation, and suggested a postponement, on the ground 
of common decency. Temple brushed this objection aside 
with contempt. He wished the thing done at once, and 
done it was. 

Hardly had he thus been ennobled when we find him 
signalising his new rank by a filthy trick more suited to a 
barge than a court. At a reception in his own house, 
presided over by his charming and accomplished wife, 
Lord Cobham, as he was now styled, spat into the hat 
which Lord Hervey held in his hand. This feat Cobham 
had betted a guinea that he would accomplish. Hervey 
behaved with temper and coolness. Cobham took the 
hat and wiped it with profuse excuses, trying to pass the 
matter off as a joke; but after some days of humiliation 
he had to write an explicit apology with a recital of all his 

127 



LORD CHATHAM 

previous efforts to appease Hervey's resentment. 1 Such 
diversions, Lady Hester Stanhope declares, were common 
at Stowe. She narrates one scarcely less nauseous. 2 

Having obtained the earldom, his next object was the 
Garter. George II. detested him, and refused the request 
with asperity. So Pitt had to be brought in. Pitt was 
then all-powerful, for this was the autumn of 1759. He 
wrote a note full of sombre menace to Newcastle, and de- 
manded the Garter for Temple as a reward for his own 
services; but still the King refused. Then the last reserves 
were brought into play. Temple resigned the Privy Seal 
on the ground that the Garter was denied. Pitt had at 
the same time a peremptory interview with Newcastle. 
The King had to yield, but could not repress his anger. 
He threw the ribbon to Temple as a bone is thrown to a 
dog. But delicacy, as we have seen, did not trouble Temple 
in matters of substance, and he was satisfied. 

Having obtained these two objects of ambition, he now 
played for a dukedom. This ambition, suspected pre- 
sumably in Cobham, had been the subject of epigram so 
early as 1742. 3 It was avowed, according to Walpole, 
in 1767, and, indeed, no other explanation seems adapted 
to his various proceedings at critical junctures. Thus, 
when in June, 1765, George III. and his uncle Cumberland 
tried to form a Pitt ministry, but found that an absolute 
condition of such a ministry was that Temple should be 
First Lord of the Treasury, Temple refused on various 
flimsy pretexts. When these were surmounted, he declared 
that ' he had tender and delicate reasons ' which he did not 
explain to the King, or, apparently, to Pitt. 4 That this 

1 Walpole to Mann, Feb. 25, 1750. 

2 Memoirs of Lady Hester Stanhope, iii. 179. 

3 See ' The New Ministry, containing a collection of all the satyrical poems, 
songs, &c. 1742.' 

4 Phillimore's Lyttelton, 681. 

128 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

unwonted delicacy and tenderness were concentrated on 
the superior coronet appears from the negotiation carried 
on by Horace Walpole in 1767, when Lord Hertford assured 
him of the fact that Lord Temple's ambition was now a 
dukedom. 1 It is not doubtful that this had now become 
the central preoccupation of his life, and the hereditary 
object of the family combination. At first sight it would 
seem improbable that Pitt was aware of it, for the simple 
reason that he would probably have made efforts to obtain 
it from the King. On the other hand, it is unlikely that 
Temple, in the affair of the Garter, having found the in- 
estimable value of Pitt's pressure on George II., could have 
foregone the effort to exercise it on George III. On the 
whole, the most plausible conjecture appears to be that 
Pitt was unsuccessfully sounded by his brother-in-law. All 
that we know is, that when Pitt finally determined to 
undertake the ministry without Temple, they had a heated 
interview, which seems to have left deep marks on Pitt's 
nerves and health, but whether it turned on Temple's 
particular ambition or not can now only be matter for 
surmise. 

The death of Temple made no difference to the family 
ambition. His nephew made violent, even frantic, but 
ineffectual efforts to obtain the title through Chatham's 
son. Nor were other means of aggrandisement neglected. 
By marriage there accrued the fortunes of Chambers, 
Nugent, Chandos, and, by some other way, that of Doding- 
ton. Acre was added to acre and estate to estate, often 
by the dangerous expedient of borrowed money, until 
Buckinghamshire seemed likely to become the appanage of 
the family . Borough influence was laboriously accumulated 
and maintained. Nor were nobler possessions disdained. 
Rare books and manuscripts, choice pictures, and sump- 

^rford's George III., Hi., 137- 
129 



LORD CHATHAM 

tuous furniture were added by successive generations to 
the splendid collections of St owe. Finally, in the reign of 
George IV., and in the time of Temple's great-nephew, the 
object was attained. Lord Liverpool acquired the support 
of the Grenville parliamentary influence by an almost com- 
mercial compact, Louis XVIII. added his instances, and 
Buckingham became a duke. From that moment the star 
of the family visibly paled. Eight years afterwards the 
duke had to shut up St owe, and go abroad. Less than 
twenty years from then the palace was dismantled, its 
treasures were dispersed, the vast estates sold, and the glories 
of the House, built up with so much care and persistence, 
vanished like a snow-wreath. 

But all this is beyond our narrative. At this time all 
these ambitions are concealed, there is nothing visible but 
cordiality, the genial flow of soul, and brotherly love. 
Pitt's early letters to George Grenville are among the 
easiest and most human that he ever wrote: he wrote 
nothing more unaffectedly tender than two letters he sent 
in September and October, 1742, to George, then abroad 
for his health. Richard and George Grenville, Lyttelton 
and William Pitt, with their set, form one of those engaging 
companionships of youth, when high spirits, warm affec- 
tions, and the day spring of life combine to animate a friend- 
ship without guile or suspicion. 

Then come separation, marriage, new interests, new 
ambitions, and the paths diverge, perhaps till sunset. So it 
was with these young men. They all at times quarrelled, 
even the kindly Lyttelton was driven to separation. Later, 
again, they all came together again in some fashion or 
another, with the exception, perhaps, of George, whose 
obstinate self-love when wounded could never be healed. 

But now all was dawn and blossom and smiles. The 
friends are full of banter. Their politics are half a frolic. 

130 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

Life is all before them. Its conditions will harden them 
presently, and they will wrangle and snarl, and have their 
quarrels and huffs. But that is not yet; not even a coming 
shadow is visible. Still, even now, it is necessary to indicate 
the nature and consequences of Pitt's absorption into the 
cousinhood. 



LORD CHATHAM 



CHAPTER VI 

IT is here that his public career begins. His lot was cast 
in stirring times. For the year of his entry into Parlia- 
ment was the fourteenth of Walpole 's long administration, 
and it was not difficult to see menacing cracks in the 
structure. The Minister himself seems to have been aware 
that his position was critical ; and at the general election in 
the previous year he had spared no exertions to secure a 
majority. In his own county of Norfolk, ^10,000 had been 
spent in support of his candidates without averting their 
defeat: from his own private means he is said, no doubt 
with gross exaggeration, to have expended no less than 
^60,000. Figures like these, however swollen by rumour, 
denote the intensity of the struggle. But in spite of all, 
his losses were considerable. Even Scotland, in those days 
the hungry dependant of all Governments, was shaken in 
her allegiance. And, though he gained the victory, the 
toughness of the contest betokened clearly that his stability 
was seriously impaired, and that the country was weary of 
his domination. 

For this there were many obvious causes. One, of 
course, was the universal unpopularity of the Excise scheme. 
It was also one of the moments in our history when the 
country is uneasily conscious of weakness and possible 
humiliation abroad, and when the silent and passive in- 
terests of peace weigh lightly in the balance against the 
smarting burden of wounded self-respect. But the most 
operative cause lay in Walpole himself. 

There is no enigma about Walpole. He sprang from 

132 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

near a score of generations of Norfolk squires who had spent 
six hundred years in healthy obscurity and the simple 
pleasures of the country. None of them apparently had 
brains, or the need of them. From these he inherited a 
frame hardy and robust, and that taste for the sports of 
the field that never left him. He had also the advantage 
of being brought up as a younger son to work, and thus 
he gained that self-reliant and pertinacious industry which 
served him so well through long years of high office. From 
the beginning to the end he was primarily a man of business. 
Had he not been a politician it cannot be doubted that he 
would have been a great merchant or a great financier. 
■And, though his lot was cast in politics, a man of business 
he essentially remained. This is not to say that he was 
not a consummate parliamentary debater, for that he must 
have been. But it is to suggest that the key to Walpole's 
character as Prime Minister lies in his instincts and qualifi- 
cations as a man of business. His main tendency was not, 
as with Chesterfield and Carteret and Bolingbroke, towards 
high statesmanship. His first object was to carry on the 
business of the country in a business spirit, as economically 
and as peacefully as possible. His chief pre-occupation 
apart from this was the keeping out of the rival house of 
Stuart, which would not have employed the firm of Walpole 
and the Whigs to keep their accounts. It is quite possible 
that as a patriot he may have also dreaded the probable 
evils of the Stuart dynasty. But the first reason is amply 
sufficient. The corruption of which he was undoubtedly 
guilty, but of which he was by no means the inventor, he 
perhaps considered as the commission due to customers ; or 
else he may have argued, ' these men have to be bought by 
somebody, let us do it in a business-like way.' His merci- 
less crushing of any rivals was simply the big firm crushing 
competition, a familiar feature of commerce. His canying 
10 133 



LORD CHATHAM 

on a war against Spain in spite of his own conscientious 
disapproval can only be satisfactorily explained on the 
same hypothesis. The nation would have war: well, if it 
must, he could carry it on more cheaply, and limit its mis- 
chief more effectually than any other contractor. More- 
over, Walpole had all along been the merchants' man. 
He had given them peace and wealth. Now for commercial 
purposes they wanted war and he had to gratify them. 
They had been the main backers of his administration, the 
deprivation of their support would have left him bare; so 
when they turned round he had to follow, with scarcely 
the appearance of leadership. 

In these days we should undoubtedly condemn any 
statesman who declared a war of which he disapproved. 
Lord Aberdeen morbidly and unjustly accused himself of 
this offence, and refused to be comforted. That is the 
other extreme to Walpole 's position. But we must re- 
member the political morality of those times. Was there 
then living a statesman who would have acted differently? 
From this sweeping question we cannot except Pitt, who 
was bitterly denouncing Walpole for his pacific attitude, 
and had afterwards to confess that Walpole had been right. 

We regard Walpole, then, first and foremost as a man 
of business, led into the great error with which history 
reproaches him by his brother men of business. Still, his 
qualities in that capacity would not have maintained him 
for years as Prime Minister. They proved him to be a 
hard-working man with practical knowledge of affairs and 
strong common sense; a sagacious man who hated extremes. 
He had besides the highest qualities of a parliamentary 
leader. Of imagination, unless it may be inferred from 
his palace and picture gallery, he seems to have been 
totally destitute. But he had dauntless courage and im- 
perturbable temper. 

*34 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

To his courage George II., who was not profuse of 
praise, gave ardent testimony. 'He is a brave fellow, ' 
he would cry out vehemently, with a flush and an oath,, 
'he has more spirit than any man I ever knew'; a com- 
pliment ill-requited by Sir Robert, who declared that his 
master, if he knew anything of him, was, 'with all his 
'personal bravery, as great a political coward as ever wore 
'a crown.' Early in his career as Prime Minister Sir 
Robert, who had the art, rare among eighteenth century 
politicians, of inditing pointed and pregnant letters, had 
written to an Irish Viceroy : ' I have weathered great 
storms before now, and shall not be lost in an Irish hurri- 
cane.' * This was no vain boast; it was the spirit in which 
he habitually conducted affairs. In truth Walpole's cour- 
age stands in no need of witness, it speaks for itself; his 
very defects arose from it or prove it. His jealousy of 
ability which deprived him of precious allies and compelled 
him to fight single-handed, his intolerance of independence 
in his party which had the same effect, all show the daunt- 
less self-confidence of the man. He wanted no competitors^ 
no dubious allies, no assistance but that of unflagging 
votes or diligent service; for all else he relied on himself 
alone. 

This great minister had all the defects of his qualities as 
well as one which seemed curiously alien to them. Part of 
his strength lay in a coarse and burly, if cynical, geniality. 
His temper, as we have said, was imperturbable; we shall 
see this even in the closing scene of his ministry ; it was even 
cordial, and sometimes boisterous. He loved to seem rather 
a country gentleman than a statesman. He seemed most 
natural when shooting and carousing at Houghton, or carous- 
ing and hunting at Richmond. But his appearance was 
deceptive ; he was what the French would call ' un faux bon- 

1 Ballantyne's Carteret, 107, 
135 



LORD CHATHAM 

homme, ' a spurious good fellow. Good nature perhaps could 
hardly have survived the desperate battles and intrigues in 
which this hard-bitten old statesman had been engaged all 
his life. And so under this bluff and debonair exterior there 
was concealed a jealousy of power, passing the jealousy of 
woman, and the ruthless vindictiveness of a Red Indian. 
To the opposition of his political foes he opposed a stout 
and unflinching front which shielded a gang of mediocrities ; 
with these enemies he fought a battle in which quarter was 
neither granted nor expected. But his own forces were 
kept under martial law ; anything like opposition or rivalry 
within his ranks he crushed in the relentless spirit of Peter 
the Great. By these methods he had not merely main- 
tained an iron discipline among his own supporters, but had 
himself constructed by alienation and proscription the op- 
position to his administration, an opposition which com- 
prised consummate abilities and undying resentments. For 
he had driven from him and united in a league of implacable 
revenge almost all the men of power and leading in Parlia- 
ment. Politics to them were embodied in one controlling 
idea; how to compass the fall, the ruin, the impeachment of 
Walpole. The undaunted minister faced them with con- 
fident serenity, though they were not enemies to be dis- 
dained. Pulteney, Wyndham, Chesterfield, and Carteret 
were men of the highest ability and distinction. Barnard 
and Polwarth, Shippen and Sandys, were from character or 
intellect scarcely less redoubtable. Behind them lurked 
Bolingbroke, excluded, indeed, from Parliament by the vig- 
ilant detestation of Walpole, but guiding and inspiring from 
his enforced retirement, the seer and oracle of all the Min- 
ister's enemies, for — 

Princely counsel in his face yet shone, 
Majestic, though in ruin. 
136 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

Prominent among these stately combatants was an ano- 
malous figure with a brain as shallow and futile as St. 
John's was active and brilliant, but by the nature of things 
as formidable as Bolingbroke was impotent, Frederick 
Prince of Wales. For Frederick was soon to add to the 
second position in the country the leadership of the Opposi- 
tion. The King's health was supposed to be precarious, 
though he lived cheerfully and not ingloriously for another 
quarter of a century. And the Heir Apparent, feeling con- 
scious of his advantages, and determined to assert himself, 
became the complacent puppet of all the factions opposed to 
his father's Government. His Court, indeed, resembled 
that famous cave to which were gathered every one that 
was discontented and every one that was in distress. All 
who had been spurned or ousted by Walpole, all who were 
under the displeasure of the King, all who saw little prospect 
of advancement under the present reign, hastened to rally 
round the Heir Apparent. He was soon to employ Pitt 
about his person. It is well, then, to pause a moment and 
consider this prominent and formidable figure. 

Frederick, Prince of Wales, is one of the idle mysteries 
of English history. The problem does not lie in his being 
a political leader, in spite of the general contempt in which 
he was held by his contemporaries and associates; for an 
heir-apparent to the Crown can always, if he chooses, be a 
factor in party politics, though it is scarcely possible that 
his intervention can be beneficial. But no circumstance 
known to us can explain the virulence of aversion with 
which the King and Queen regarded him, which was so 
intense as to be almost incredible. They were both good 
haters, and yet they hated no one half so much as their eldest 
son. His father called him the greatest beast and liar and 
scoundrel in existence. His mother and his sister wished 
hourly to hear of his death. This violence of unnatural 

i37 



LORD CHATHAM 

loathing is not to be accounted for by any known facts. 
Frederick was a poor creature, no doubt, a vain and fatuous 
coxcomb. But human beings are constantly the parents 
of coxcombs without regarding them as vermin. The only 
conjecture in regard to the matter which seems to furnish 
adequate ground for these feelings is that the King was 
bred in the narrow school of a little German State, where, 
though nothing less than affection was expected between 
a prince and his heir, discipline was rigidly observed; so 
that the conduct of Frederick, in assuming a position inde- 
pendent and defiant of his father, and in openly heading 
an opposition to his Government, was an offence the more 
unspeakable and unpardonable as it had been absolutely 
beyond the "limits of Hanoverian contemplation. There 
was, it must be confessed, an hereditary predisposition to 
this parental relation. The King himself, when Prince of 
Wales, had been placed under arrest by his father for the 
somewhat venial offence of insulting the Duke of Newcastle. 
He had submitted himself to his disgrace, and his opposition 
had only been passive and inarticulate; he had never 
dreamed of forming a faction hostile to the Crown. His only 
real crimes had been his right of succession and a fictitious 
popularity founded on dislike of his father's mistresses. And 
yet his father hated him almost as much as father ever hated 
son. It was reserved for George II. to discover a deeper 
abhorrence for his own heir. With his views of absolute 
authority, a peculiar degree of detestation had to be dis- 
covered for a Prince of Wales who had not merely the in- 
herent vice of heirship apparent but the gratuitous offence 
of an active opposition which his father deemed flagrant 
rebellion. Given violent temper, ill manners, and a sort of 
family tradition, the cause of wrath can best be thus ex- 
plained. 

Beyond this we know nothing for certain, and presuma- 

138 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

bly shall never know more. There are some facts, but they 
are insufficient. 

It is said that as a mere boy he gamed and drank and 
kept a mistress. By this last scandal the royal family was 
enabled to present to the world the unedifying spectacle of 
grandfather, father, and son simultaneously living under 
these immoral conditions ; and all three, it is said, successively 
with the same woman. But these facts alone would cer- 
tainly not have accounted for his father's displeasure. 
Again, it is narrated that when his tutor complained of him 
his mother said that these were page's tricks. 'Would to 
God they were, madam,' replied the tutor, 'but they are 
rather the tricks of lackeys and knaves. ' And tricky Fred- 
erick undoubtedly was from the beginning to the end. But 
trickiness, though it was not among the King's faults, and 
though it would excite his just contempt, cannot alone have 
caused the intensity of his hatred. 

One if not two of Frederick's escapades were concerned 
with designs of marriage. He was discovered on the point 
of concluding a secret alliance with Princess Wilhelmine 
of Prussia, with whom he professed himself in love, and who 
afterwards became known to us as Margravine of Bareith; 
on another occasion it is said that he was lured by a dowry of 
£1 00,000 into a betrothal with Lady Diana Spencer, grand- 
daughter of Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough. Both these 
affairs were interrupted at the last moment. In both cases 
the King was irritated by the underhand proceedings of his 
son, and by the total lack of a confidence which, as he pro- 
bably omitted to remember, he had done nothing to gain. 
But his crowning outrage was a monkey-trick, both wanton 
and barbarous. When he had at last married a princess 
of his father's choice, and his wife was seized with the first 
pangs of maternity in the King's palace of Hampton Court, 
he hurried her off, in her agony and in spite of her en- 

i39 



LORD CHATHAM 

treaties, to St. James's. At any moment of the journey a 
catastrophe might have occurred. What the motive was 
for this cruel and unmeaning escapade cannot be guessed, 
for his own explanations were futile. It was said that his 
father suspected him of an intention to foist a spurious 
child on his family and that he resented the suspicion. If 
that were so his action was exactly suited to confirm it. 
Whatever his purpose may have been, the King and 
Queen, from whom the imminence of the Princess's situa- 
tion had been carefully concealed, were naturally and 
grossly insulted. The King banished him from his palace 
and presence, and forbade the Court to all who should 
visit him. Nor was there ever an approach to recon- 
ciliation or forgiveness in the fourteen years that the 
Prince had yet to live. The King would receive him 
at Court and would express the hope that his wife was 
in good health; that was the extent of their relations. 
But though this was the culminating point of his known 
misconduct, it would almost seem that there was some 
more occult reason which we do not know. We only guess 
at its existence from the record of Lord Hardwicke. At 
the time of this last scandal 'Sir Robert Walpole,' says 
the Chancellor, 'informed me of certain passages between 
the King and himself, and between the King and the Prince, 
of too high and secret a nature even to be trusted to this 
narrative; but from thence I found great reason to think 
that this unhappy difference between the King and Queen 
and His Royal Highness turned upon some points of a 
more interesting and important nature than have hitherto 
appeared.' 1 There, then, is the mystery, without a key, 
with no room even for conjecture. But the cause must 
have been dire that evoked so deadly a passion of hatred 
between parents and son. 

1 Harris's Hardwicke, i. 382. 
140 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

Those who care to read in detail the coarse and violent 
expressions of this unnatural repulsion may glut their 
appetite in Lord Hervey's memoirs. One or two such 
passages will serve as specimens of the rest. The Queen 
and Princess Caroline, Frederick's sister, made no cere- 
mony of wishing a hundred times a day that the Prince 
might drop down dead of an apoplexy. Princess Caroline, 
who, Hervey tells us, 'had affability without meanness, 
dignity without pride, cheerfulness without levity, and 
prudence without falsehood,' who was in a word an ex- 
emplary and charming person, declared that she grudged 
him every hour he had to breathe, and reproached Hervey 
with being 'so great a dupe as to believe the nauseous 
beast' (those were her words) 'cared for anything but his 
own nauseous self, that he loved anything but money, that 
he was not the greatest liar that ever spoke. ' The Queen, 
not to be outdone, declared that she would give it under 
her hand 'that my dear firstborn is the greatest ass, and 
the greatest liar, and the greatest canaille, and the greatest 
beast in the whole world, and that I most heartily wish 
he was out of it.' 1 Even on her deathbed she could not 
be brought to receive or forgive him. If Lord Hervey, 
his bitter enemy, can be credited, this obduracy was not 
at the last without justification. Lord Hervey declares 
that the Prince crowded the Queen's anteroom with his 
emissaries to convey to him the earliest information of her 
condition. As the bulletins of the Queen's decline reached 
him, he would say, ' Well, now we shall have some good 
news; she cannot hold out much longer.' All this need 
not be literally believed, but it affords a picture of family 
rancour which can scarcely have been equalled in the history 
of mankind. 

From the time of the public quarrel with his parents the 

1 These expressions are taken from Hervey's Memoirs. 
141 



LORD CHATHAM 

Prince of Wales gave himself up to political opposition. 
He wielded, indeed, formidable weapons of offence. His 
father was avaricious, secluded, and disliked; Frederick 
laid himself out to be thought generous, accessible, and 
popular. He knew well that every symptom of national 
affection for himself was a stab to the King. He and his 
family, at a time when French fashions were all the rage, 
ostentatiously wore none but English goods. He trained 
his children to act Addison's Cato. Nor did he disdain 
more social arts. He would go to fairs, bull - baitings, 
races, and rowing matches ; he would visit gipsy encamp- 
ents; he became familiar to the people. He would 
assist at a fire in London, amid shouts from the mob, 
as he and his court alleged, of 'Crown him! crown him!' 
At Epsom there is a tradition that when living there 
he fought a chimney-sweep with his fists, and erected 
a monument in generous acknowledgment of his own 
defeat. 

In private life he was essentially frivolous. When 
his father's troops were besieging Carlisle, the Prince had 
a model of the citadel made in confectionery, while he and 
the ladies of the court bombarded it with sugar-plums. 
This seems emblematic of his whole career. 

But his main and favourite diversion had a graver aspect : 
it lay in political cabals of which he was the puppet and 
the figurehead, and in forming futile ministries and policies 
for his own reign. Of these last a curious example is 
preserved among the Bedford Papers. 1 

All political malcontents of the slightest importance 
were sure of a cordial reception at Leicester House or Kew. 
There all could warm their wants and disappointments 
with the sunshine of royal patronage and the cheering 
prospect of a new reign. 'Remember that the King is 

1 Dated Feb. 8, 1748. Bedford Correspondence, i. 320 
142 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

sixty-one, and I am thirty-seven,' 1 said Frederick, and this 
calculation coloured his whole life. The future was freely 
discounted and anticipated in the Prince's circle, so that 
there, as in the Court of the Pretender, the faithful adherent 
might receive some high office to be enjoyed after the 
death of the King, but with this substantial difference: that 
whereas what James distributed were shadows, the awards 
of Frederick required only common good faith and the 
death of an old man to make them realities. Bubb, for 
example, the most avid and unabashed of political harlots, 
gravely kissed his patron's hand for a Secretaryship of State, 
and, according to Walpole, a dukedom, immediately after- 
wards nominating his under-secret ary, to show the solidity 
of the arrangement. Henley, who was afterwards under 
different circumstances to be Chancellor, was grievously 
disappointed to find that Dr. Lee was to have the seals. 
And so they snapped and snarled over the spoils, while the 
Prince complacently made his appointments, and appor- 
tioned the functions of the future. So far as he was con- 
cerned it was all barren enough. His little projects, his 
little ambitions, his little ministries, his political post-obits, 
were all cut short by the sudden shears of Death. His 
councillors and followers were scattered to the winds, and 
Bubb had to hasten to make his peace with the powers 
that be, and to exchange his contingent Secretaryship of 
State for an actual Treasurership of the Navy. The 
Prince's other post-obits, his debts, were, it would seem, 
never paid. 2 

To sum up, with regard to Frederick we have a few 
certain facts: the hatred of his parents and sisters, and 
a singular unanimity of scorn from his contemporaries. 
There is not perhaps in existence a single favourable testi- 

1 Marchmont Papers, i. 84. 

2 Lord Dover's note to H. Walpole's letter of March 21, 1751. 

*43 



LORD CHATHAM 

mony. We have many portraits, one at Windsor of an 
innocent lad in a red coat playing the violoncello with his 
sisters, which is pleasant enough; the later ones all stamped 
with a pretentious silliness which affirms the verdict of his 
own day. Then we have the mysterious intimation of Lord 
Hardwicke of some deep and sinister cause for the aliena- 
tion of his parents. This, however, unsupported and unex- 
plained, carries us no further, and is merely an excuse for 
the unnatural aversion of his family. Beyond that mystery, 
the word 'fatuous' seems exactly to embody all that we 
know of this prince; his appearance, morals, manners, and 
intellect are all summed up in that single expression. 

On the other hand, there are traits of generosity which 
are recorded, there is his apparent popularity, there is the 
general grief for his death; but it may well be surmised 
that it was not difficult for the son of George II. and the 
grandson of George I. to be popular and regretted. On the 
whole, may we not conclude that the arbitrary discipline of 
Hanover in early life made him incurably tricky and un- 
truthful, that he was an empty and frivolous coxcomb, but 
not without kindly instincts ; and that his weaknesses and 
frailties, whatever they may have been, laid a grave respon- 
sibility on the parents who reared and cursed him? 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 



CHAPTER VII 

DURING his first session of Parliament, Pitt never 
opened his mouth: indeed, his only public perform- 
ance was to tell in a division. In 1736 he became better 
known. He supported an address of congratulation to the 
Crown on the marriage of the Prince of Wales. This formal 
and complimentary speech has been absurdly scrutinised 
because of the speaker's subsequent fame, and much has 
been read into it which no impartial reader can now discern. 
A notorious eulogy describes it as superior even to the 
models of ancient eloquence. Others read into it piercing 
innuendoes and vitriolic sarcasm. All this was discovered, 
long after its delivery, by the light of Pitt's later achieve- 
ments. It is said that George II. never forgave it. But 
George II. 's hatred of Pitt is more easily accounted for by 
other offences . It is rumoured that Walpole shuddered when 
he heard it, and said, ' We must muzzle that terrible cornet of 
horse.' The ordinary reader sees in the reported speech 
nothing which would provoke admiration or alarm in any- 
body were it attributed to any one who had remained 
obscure. But the report, though elaborate, was probably 
inaccurate; the speech may have been more vicious than 
appears; it must, at any rate, have been something very 
different from smooth platitudes on a royal marriage that 
would have made Walpole tremble, if indeed Walpole was 
liable to any such emotion. The truth, no doubt, is that 
the graces of voice, person, and delivery marvellously em- 
bellished this maiden effort, and produced a striking effect 
on the audience. 

145 



LORD CHATHAM 

But, whatever its intrinsic merits, the success of this 
speech was immeasurably enhanced, if not altogether secured, 
by Walpole's action. It may indeed be said to have been 
made famous by the penalty which followed it rather than 
by its own merits. He deprived the young orator and 
cornet of his commission. 

' The servile standard from the freeborn hand 
He took, and bade thee lead the patriot band,' 

sang Lyttelton to Pitt. 

It was a vindictive act which seems alien to Walpole's 
boisterous good humour, but of a kind to which Walpole's 
arbitrary notions of political discipline made him singularly 
prone. So petty an act of vengeance wreaked on so young 
and subordinate an officer by a powerful Prime Minister 
seems incredible in our larger or laxer days. But it was 
perhaps the very slightness of Pitt's position which was an 
inducement to Walpole. He was determined, it may be, 
that the whole army, from the highest to the lowest, should 
feel the weight of his hand. The disgrace of political 
generals seemed just and proper, it was cutting off the 
heads of the tallest poppies, a proceeding recognised and 
respectable since the days of Tarquin. These penalties had 
left the mass of the army unmoved, not impossibly because 
the removal of chiefs means the promotion of subordinates. 
So Walpole may have resolved that all in the service of the 
Crown should feel that revolt against the minister of the 
Crown was a flagrant crime. Generals had been punished, 
and so all officers from the highest to the lowest should be 
liable to the same pains and penalties ; nay, private soldiers, 
were their lot enviable, might suffer the same deprivation. 
' The King,' wrote Lady Irwin, a lady of the Prince of Wales' 
household, to her brother, Lord Carlisle, 'two days ago 

146 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

turned out Mr. Pitt from a cornetcy for having voted and 
spoke in Parliament contrary to his approbation. He is a 
young man of no fortune, a very pretty speaker, one the 
Prince is particular to, and under the tuition of my Lord 
Cobham. The Army is all alarmed at this, and 'tis said it 
will hurt the King more than his removing my Lord Stairs 
and Lord Cobham, since it is making the whole army 
-dependent, by descending to resent a vote from the lowest 
commission, which may occasion a representation in parlia- 
ment to prevent all officers of the army from sitting there.' x 

It may, however, have been that Pitt's dismissal was 
due not to his obscurity but to an exactly opposite con- 
sideration. 

Pitt's nephew, Lord Camelford, asserts as an undoubted 
fact that the reputation both of Pitt and of Lyttelton was 
so considerable before they entered Parliament, and their 
political tendencies so notorious, that Walpole made consid- 
erable offers to Thomas Pitt on condition that he did not 
bring them in for any of his boroughs. ' William's early 
abilities,' writes Lord Camelford, ' indue 'd Sir Robert Wal- 
pole to offer my father (Thomas Pitt) any terms not to 
bring him or his brother-in-law Mr. Lyttelton into Parlia- 
ment,' but 'my father preferred their interests to his own, 
and laid the foundations, at his own expense, for all his 
brother's future fame and greatness.' It is a tradition that 
Canning, when in office, kept his eye on promising lads at 
Eton who might make eligible followers. One would not, 
however, have imagined that Walpole was so much in touch 
with the rising youth of the country. But if Camelford 
may be credited, and there seems no reason to doubt him, 
Walpole was prejudiced and on his guard against Pitt before 
Pitt opened his mouth ; and he may have been hurried into 
a petulant act by previous friction unconnected with the 

1 Carlisle Papers (Hist. MSS.), 172. 
147 



LORD CHATHAM 

speech, which may, moreover, have contained irritating 
innuendoes directed against Walpole, which Walpole alone 
understood. 

The minister had not been so foolish as to alienate 
without trying to secure, and his failure may have exas- 
perated him the more. In later years Pitt told Shelburne 
that Sir Robert had offered him the troop which was after- 
wards given to Conway, so that had he remained in the 
army he would have stood high by seniority alone. This 
offer, we may conjecture, was just previous to the overtures 
to Thomas Pitt. Walpole, hearing reports of the young 
officer's conspicuous abilities and of his hostility to the 
Government, would try and fix his ambitions in the army. 
Failing that, he would try and exclude him from Parliament. 
And failing all pacific overtures, he would try different 
methods. It is possible, and even probable, that expressions 
passed during the negotiations which left a sting. But it 
now seems clear that no young private member, without 
means or influence, ever caused such active disquietude. 

There is yet another, and, perhaps, a simpler reason. 
Pitt, as we have seen, had become identified with the 
fortunes and party of Cobham, who was Walpole 's bitter 
enemy. Conciliation having been found futile, the min- 
ister determined that the young soldier should suffer the 
same penalty as the old general. The old gamecock had 
lost his spurs, so should the young cockerel. If Pitt were 
so devoted to Cobham, he should have the gratification of 
sharing Cobham 's martyrdom. Cobham had lost his regi- 
ment; Pitt should lose his commission. In striking Pitt he 
would also wound Cobham. So the removal was carried out 
in a spirit of pettiness which was criticised at the time, and 
seems incredible to posterity. 'At the end of the session,' 
says Hervey, ' Cornet Pitt was broke for. this, which was 
a measure at least ill-timed if not ill-taken'; which he 

148 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

explained by saying that if done at all it should have been 
done immediately on his speech. Hervey, though an ardent 
Walpolian, evidently thought the whole proceeding was 
disproportionate to the offender and the offence. But the 
result of the intended disgrace was, we are told, imme- 
diate popularity. Pitt after his dismissal drove about the 
country in a one-horse chaise without a servant, and 
everywhere the people gathered round him with enthu- 
siasm. 1 

Pitt took the matter philosophically. ' I should not be 
a little vain, ' he writes, ' to be the object of the hatred of a 
minister, hated even by those who call themselves his 
friends.' 2 But to his slender means the loss of his pay was 
not unimportant, and this fact perhaps explains his accept- 
ing an office ill-suited to his temperament. In September 
1737, the Prince of Wales, in consequence of his crazy and 
insolent conduct at the time of his wife's confinement, was 
ordered to leave St. James' Palace. He retired first to 
Kew, and then to Norfolk House in St. James' Square, which 
thus became the birthplace of George III. The King's' 
displeasure also caused some resignations in the Prince's 
household; and, smarting under this disgrace, Frederick 
found it no doubt agreeable to take advantage of these 
vacancies to attach to his household two active young 
members of the Opposition, whose appointment would be 
profoundly distasteful to his father. Few could be more 
repugnant to the King than Pitt, the ex-cornet, and Lyt- 
telton his seconder. Moreover, Pitt was already intimate 
and influential with the Prince. 3 So Lyttelton became 
private secretary to Frederick, and Pitt a groom of his bed- 
chamber. These appointments would, in the ordinary 
course, be submitted for the sanction of the King, but the 

Reward, ii. 362. 2 Lady Suffolk's Letters, ii. 151. 

3 Hervey, ii. 195. 

11 149 



LORD CHATHAM 

alienation between father and son was so acute that it is 
probable that no communication was made. Pitt held this 
post for seven years, resigning it in 1 744 ; and the salary was 
no doubt of sensible assistance to his meagre income during 
this period. 

Pitt's second speech (in 1737) was also on the Prince 
of Wales's affairs. George II., who lost no opportunity 
of displaying publicly his hatred to his son, and who as 
Prince of Wales had received a fixed income of 100,000/. 
a year, gave the Prince on his marriage an allowance at 
pleasure of 50,000/. The Prince, who owed his father but 
scant duty and affection, was persuaded by his advisers to 
apply to Parliament for the same annuity that his father, 
when in his situation, had received. This proceeding 
violently incensed the King; but he was induced to send 
an official message to his son, promising to convert the 
present voluntary allowance into a fixed income, and to 
settle some provision on the Princess. The Prince replied 
that the matter was now out of his hands. The offer, in 
effect, was not particulary alluring, as the allowance could 
never have been withdrawn, and a settlement on the Prin- 
cess ought to have been made at the time of her marriage. 
It is indeed difficult, given the circumstances, to blame 
Frederick's unfilial conduct in this matter. He had a 
colourable claim to an income double that which was given 
him by the King; the King had ampler means of paying 
it than had been possessed by George I. ; and the Prince 
had nothing to hope from the unconstrained bounty of 
his father; he was indeed under his father's ban. So the 
motion was brought before the House, and Pitt made a 
speech, which Thackeray, his insipid biographer, declares to 
have been most masterly, but which is nowhere preserved. 
We know nothing of it, but it is safe to presume that it was 
a good speech. These efforts and his household appoint- 

150 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

ment made him a prominent figure in the Prince's party. 
He was beginning to be talked about. He had been sneered 
at by the Government paper, the Gazetteer, and defended 
by Bolingbroke's organ, the Craftsman. This seems the first 
glimmering of his note, and is therefore worthy of remark. 
Nothing is so difficult as to trace in a biography the several 
degrees by which eminence has been reached; seldom are 
the slow degrees of the ladder recorded. Here it is at least 
possible to mark the first and second steps. The first event 
that brought Pitt into notice was the deprivation of his 
commission: the second indication of his growing power 
is apparent in the laboured sneers of the Gazetteer at the 
young man's long neck and slender body, for it would 
not have been worth while to direct these gibes against 
one who was not formidable. 

Pitt's next speech was less successful. It was in support 
of a reduction of the standing army from 17,400 to 12,000. 
The contention seems almost incredible when it is considered 
that Pitt and his party were calling on the ministry to 
avenge the ill-treatment of British subjects by Spain. But, 
however inconsistent, it was probably deemed a popular 
move. Jealousy and dislike of standing armies was still 
strong among the people. Lord Hervey had told the 
Queen in 1735, 'that there was certainly nothing so odious 
to men of all ranks and classes in this country as troops, ' and 
that ' as a standing army was the thing in the world that 
was most disliked in this country, so the reduction of any 
part of it was a measure that always made any prince more 
popular than any other he could take. ' 1 Walpole had then 
maintained that the army should never be reduced below 
18,000 men in view of the constant menace of the disputed 
succession, the turbulent character of the nation, and the 
necessity of a strong position in foreign affairs. 2 In this 

1 Hervey, ii. 80. lb. ii. 82. 



LORD CHATHAM 

debate of 1 738 he took much the same line. This sane view, 
as it was the policy of the minister, was furiously combated 
by the young bloods of the Opposition. Lyttelton did not 
shrink from using the childish argument that a standing 
army weakened us abroad, as it made foreign govern- 
ments believe that there must be violent dissensions in the 
country which it was kept to control. A taunt had in 
the course of debate been levelled at placemen; and Pitt, 
as a member of the Prince's household, vindicated the 
independence of officials, directing as he passed a shaft at 
the three hundred thick or thin supporters of the Govern- 
ment who were always so singularly unanimous on all 
political questions. The army, he said, was the chief cause 
of the national discontents, and yet these discontents were 
alleged as the chief cause for maintaining the army. Then 
he made the criticism so familiar to English public men 
even now, that the army cost three times as much pro- 
portionally to its size as the armies of France and Germany. 
On the question of disbanding troops, he took a strangely 
unsympathetic line. The officers would be put on half -pay, 
which was as high as full-pay elsewhere. And as for the 
private soldiers, ' I must think, ' he said, ' they have no claim 
for any greater reward than the pay they have already 
received, nor should I think we were guilty of the least 
ingratitude if they were all turned adrift to-morrow morn- 
ing.' 1 Pitt, it was obvious, had some distance to compass 
before he should become a popular leader. That he should 
have pressed at all for the reduction of the small standing 
army in the midst of an irresistible clamour for war is 
another proof of the heedless rhetoric of ambitious youth. 
While the young patriots were thus endeavouring to re- 
duce the army, war was brewing with Spain. Our traders 
were constantly encroaching on her rights and monopolies 

1 Pari. Hist. x. 464-7. 
152 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

in the New World. There was a perpetual smuggling in- 
vasion of the Spanish settlements in America on the part 
of the British, and a rigorous defence by right of search 
on the part of the Spaniards. There can be little doubt 
that the British merchants were in the wrong. But trade 
has neither conscience nor bowels, and monopolies of com- 
merce are the fair quarry of the freebooting merchant. 
The Spaniards, on their side, were not delicate or merciful 
in exercising their undoubted right of search ; so our coun- 
trymen, to conceal their own infractions of treaty and to 
stir up hostility to Spain, spared no methods or exertions 
to rouse popular indignation against their enemies. Little 
less than the tortures of the Inquisition were alleged. 
' Seventy of our brave sailors are now in chains in Spain ! 
our countrymen in chains and slaves to the Spaniards!' 
exclaimed an enthusiastic alderman: 'is not this enough 
to fire the coldest?' 1 The notorious Jenkins now appeared 
on the scene with an ear in cotton-wool, which he alleged 
to have been torn from his head by a Spaniard, with an 
intimation that the mutilator would gladly serve our King 
in the same way. Alderman Beckford, who brought 
Jenkins forward, afterwards declared that if any member 
had lifted up Jenkins's wig, he would have found both 
ears whole and complete. 2 Others averred that though he 
had lost his ear, he had lost it in the pillory. 

The Spaniards, not to be outdone, recorded the sufferings 
of two of their nobles, who, captured by our British fili- 
busters, had been compelled to devour their own noses. 3 
It was alleged, too, that English pirates swarmed, and 
that Spaniards were publicly sold as slaves in British 
colonies. 4 But these allegations, though probably neither 

» Coxe's Sir R. Walpole, i. 575. 2 Life of Shelburne, i. 46. 

s Coxe's Sir R. Walpole, i. 580 note. 

4 See Temperley's Essay on the causes of this war in Trans, of Royal Hist. 
Soc. Series II. vol. iii. p. 207. 

153 



LORD CHATHAM 

more nor less veracious than the others, had no currency in 
England, while the story of the suffering Jenkins ran 
through England like wildfire. A bombastic utterance was 
coined for him by some political Tadpole, and rang through 
the land. None cared to inquire into the right or the wrong 
of the imprisonments, or to investigate the other side of the 
question, and there were none to present it if they did. 
' Britons in Spanish prisons' was a sufficient cry, and swept 
the nation off its feet. Walpole, always too contemptuous 
of popular passion, had presented to Parliament a conven- 
tion with Spain, which regulated most of the points at issue 
between them, except that which lay nearest the heart of 
his people, the right of search; and his brother Horace 
moved, in a long and laudatory speech, an address of 
thanks to the Crown for this agreement. This roused 
the Prince's young men. Lyttelton, indeed, spoke osten- 
tatiously as the Prince's mouthpiece. ' I know who hears 
me,' he said, alluding to his master's presence in the gallery, 
' and for that reason I speak. ' * Pitt and Grenville also 
spoke, and they are described in a contemporary account 
as ' three or four young gentlemen who took great personal 
liberties.' Another letter says that Pitt 'spoke very well, 
but very abusively.' However imperfectly his speech may 
be reported, it has much of that energy of declamatory in- 
vective which is part of the tradition connected with his 
name. Of this the peroration is a sufficient example. 
'This, convention, Sir, I think from my heart is nothing 
but a stipulation for national ignominy; an illusory ex- 
pedient to baffle the resentment of the nation ; a truce with- 
out a suspension of hostilities on the part of Spain; on 
the part of England, a suspension, as to Georgia, of the 
first law of nature, self-preservation and self-defence; 
a surrender of the right of England to the mercy of pleni- 

iParl. Hist. x. 1284. 

154 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

potentiaries ; and in this infinitely highest and sacred point, 
future security, not only inadequate, but directly repugnant 
to the resolutions of Parliament, and the gracious promise 
from the throne. The complaints of your despairing 
merchants, the voice of England, have condemned it. Be 
the guilt of it on the adviser. God forbid that the, Com- 
mittee should share the guilt by approving it.' 1 j This 
was undoubtedly the first speech in which Pitt made a 
real mark as an orator, and of this a proof remains in the 
fact that it is recorded that Sir R. Walpole took notes 
of it as it proceeded. 2 

The debate and its unsuccessful division were followed 
by that abortive and disastrous form of protest known as a 
secession. Wyndham announced it in a speech of solemn 
acrimony. It failed, as all such secessions do. It has been 
said by a veteran politician that ' a secession of a party from 
parliament is so obvious a failure in both duty and prudence 
that a benevolent looker-on will always recommend to the 
seceder to get to his place as well and as fast as he can. ' 3 A 
secession does not appeal to the country, which regards it as 
an exhibition of baffled ill-temper, while it leaves the House 
at the mercy of the Ministry. This retirement of his ene- 
mies was therefore hailed by Walpole as an unexpected 
stroke of good fortune. Prompt repentance, as usual, 
overtook the seceders, and the usual difficulty as to return- 
ing with dignity and consistency. In November they 
had to slink back without much of either. 

It is not easy to discover whether Pitt was among the 
seceders, though it seems improbable, as Lyttelton, one of 
his closest allies, remained to repeat the strange parallel 
contention of the Opposition that the army should be 
reduced and war declared against Spain. 

1 Pari. Hist. x. 1280-3. 2 Coxe's Sir R. Walpole, i. 594 note. 

3 Marchmont Papers, ii. 180, note by Rose. 

155 



LORD CHATHAM 

The national wish for war was at any rate soon gratified. 
Though Walpole had carried resolutions approving of his 
convention, the growing fury of the nation could not be 
dammed by his meagre majority of twenty-eight. When 
the negotiations between Spain and Great Britain were 
resumed, Spain absolutely refused to abandon the right of 
search. To the English this was the main point, and 
Walpole knew that war was now inevitable. Whether he 
as minister could or should, in spite of his convictions, carry 
it out was another matter. He decided that he could, and 
war was declared on October 29, 1739. 

The enthusiasm of the nation was frantic. The heralds, 
on proceeding to the city to read the formal declaration, 
were attended by a great procession. The Prince of Wales 
did not disdain to take part in it, or to pause at Temple Bar 
to drink a public toast to the war. All the church bells of 
the capital were set ringing. The Minister, as he heard the 
clang, bitterly remarked that they might ring the bells now, 
but that they would soon wring their hands. This is a 
truth that may be uttered with justice at the beginning of 
all hostilities, and in this case there were many oppor- 
tunities for wringing hands; for, with the exception of the 
truce of Aix la Chapelle, Britain was not at peace from 
now (1739) till 1763. But Walpole 's cynical pun did not 
embody the spirit which gives confidence to a nation, or 
in which a great Minister would begin a just or necessary 
war. Walpole was, no doubt, convinced that this one was 
neither just nor necessary. Moreover, he hated all war 
as a needless complication which deranged finance and 
held out prospects and opportunities for a Pretender. He 
knew, too, that he was a Minister of peace, and that he was 
not likely to shine in war. He had indeed been Secretary 
at War, but then he had the guarantee of a Marlborough 
in the field; his function had been to serve and supply a 

156 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

supreme captain. But there was nothing now to give him 
the same confidence. He felt, he knew that he was out 
of place as a director of wars. Close to him, unsuspected 
as yet, was the must successful War Minister that this 
country has ever seen. For on the benches over against 
him sate Pitt, who was to revel in warfare and find his 
true vocation in directing it; but his time was not come. 
Afterwards, when it had arrived, he was to repent and recant 
his opposition on this occasion, and pay homage to Walpole. 
None, indeed, of the leaders in opposition to Walpole at- 
tempted afterwards to justify their conduct in this business. 

That Minister meanwhile moodily prepared to carry out 
the wishes of the country, and no doubt excused himself for 
his humiliating compliance by the thought that if he did not 
some one else would, with less economy and more danger 
to the State. He is said to have tendered his resignation, 
but even were this true it could only be, in view of the 
King's relations to himself and the Opposition, a matter of 
form. He uttered his own self-condemnation : ' I dare not 
do what is right.' 

But his submission, whether accompanied or not by a 
feigned resignation, availed him nothing; his unpopularity 
seemed rather to increase than diminish. The nation 
suspected his good faith. The legion of able and brilliant 
men whom he had alienated were in no ways appeased, but 
more ruthless in their determination to hunt him to the 
death; the multitude effervesced in mobs. Soon they were 
all in full cry. There was another general election in 1741, 
when the Prince of Wales with lavish subsidies entered 
actively into the strife. Parliament, dissolved in April, 
met in December, thirsty for Walpole 's political blood. 

The inglorious course of the war in the meantime, its 
delays and disasters, forms no part of Pitt's life. One may 
wonder in passing at the callous wickedness that sent out 

i57 



LORD CHATHAM 

raw boys and decrepit pensioners to die of fever and ex- 
haustion, or at the strange fortune by which those who 
prepare such expeditions, ministers, commissaries, con- 
tractors, and the like, escape the gallows. Walpole at any 
rate did not escape the particular fate that he deserved. 
A year of glowing and successful war might yet have saved 
him; a year of failure and calamity fixed his doom. 

He had held on to the last possible moment, and so fell 
with little of grace or dignity. An inevitable political 
catastrophe only becomes more overwhelming by delay; 
each day that a minister remains in power against the will 
of the nation adds force to the torrent against him. More- 
over, he affronted public opinion by receiving unusual 
favours from the King when he had become the object 
of popular execration. Here the coarse fibre which had 
stood him in such good stead during a hundred fights did 
him disservice, for it hindered his perception of the fact that 
it is unwise to be conspicuously decorated at a moment 
when the nation is calling for your head. ' He held on, with 
failing health but unfailing courage, though the war had 
furnished him with a reasonable door of departure at the 
critical moment when honour permitted and indeed required 
him to go, and though his friends had implored him to 
resign. The motives for his obstinacy were obvious enough. 
His was a doughty soul, and did not yield without agony. 
But there was a more practical reason. He believed that, 
as had long been threatened, his fall would be followed 
by his impeachment. As soon as he resigned, his brother 
Horace hurried off to burn his papers. Walpole himself 
took a similar precaution. This shows their sense of the 
imminence of the danger which had always impended over 
him, and which was first in their thoughts when the pro- 
tection of office was about to be withdrawn. 

The final scene in the House of Commons was dramatic 

158 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

enough, and must have been in the mind of Disraeli when he 
penned his description of the fall of Peel. As the fatal divi- 
sion on the Chippenham election was proceeding, the minis- 
ter sate and watched the hostile procession with unfailing 
and imperturbable humour. He beckoned to his side 
Bayntun Rolt, the Chippenham candidate supported by 
the Opposition, and so. their nominal champion, and gave 
him a reasoned catalogue of many of the members voting 
against him, detailing their ingratitude and treachery, 
as well as the exact favours that he had heaped on them. 
'Young man, I will tell you the history of all your friends 
as they come in; that fellow I saved from the gallows, and 
that from starvation; this other one's sons I promoted,' 
and so forth; 1 then passing on through this bitter recital 
to his scornful conclusion, he declared that never again 
would he set foot in that House. 2 

He fell with the skill and presence of mind which never 
deserted him, for in everything except office he remained 
victorious. All parties had combined to destroy Walpole, 
and in their triumph all not unnaturally expected to see 
every vestige of the detested administration swept away in 
his defeat. Vast was their disappointment. Newcastle, 
the oldest of the old gang, to use the vivid expression of 
modern politics, had long scented the approaching catas- 
trophe of his chief, and had been preparing to lessen the 
shock to himself and his friends, so far as was possible, by 
judicious conference with the Opposition. 

Newcastle has long been a byeword ; he was so all through 
his protracted public life; and he has remained in history 
a synonym for a certain jobbing and fussing incapacity. 
Justice has, perhaps, been scarcely done to his laborious 
life; his disinterestedness about money, rare in any age, 

1 Life of Shelburne, i. 37. Seward's Anecdotes, ii. 309. 

2 Coxe's Sir R. Walpole, i. 695. 

*59 



LORD CHATHAM 

especially in that; above all to his unequalled capacity for 
remaining in office, a virtue not unappreciated by the great 
mass of politicians. Nor was he a fool, though he was 
something of a coward. A man who could hold the seals of 
Secretary of State for thirty continuous years of stress and 
intrigue, who filled high office for forty-five years in succes- 
sion, could not be without invaluable qualities for steering 
with persistence and astuteness through intricacies of parlia- 
mentary navigation. His ambition, such as it was, had 
indeed an elastic but stubborn tenacity; the ties of blood, 
friendship, or principle availed nothing against it. His 
industry, such as it was, is attested by his long tenure 
of office and the vast mass of his correspondence. His 
disinterestedness, such as it was, is proved by his leaving 
public life 300,000/. poorer than he entered it, and by his 
nevertheless refusing a pension offered him by George III. 
on his retirement, a circumstance almost unique in the 
annals of the century. In nothing else was he disinterested. 
His only taste in private life seems to have been for the 
pleasures of the table and the consequent art of the physi- 
cian. On his resignation in 1756 he attempted indeed to 
assume the air of a retired country squire. Guns and gaiters 
were procured, but getting his feet wet he hurriedly aban- 
doned the sports of the field and with them the appearance 
of rural absorption. This illustrates his crowning defect. 
In all that he did he was supremely ridiculous. 

Behind him close behold Newcastle's Grace, 
Haste in his step and absence in his face ; 

* * * * 

Tho' void of honesty, of sense, of art, 
A foolish head and a perfidious heart, 
Yet riches, honours, power he shall enjoy. 1 

1 Sir C. H. Williams, ii. 140-1. 
160 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

Foote and Smollett have left vivid caricatures of his 
ludicrous personality. The story of his conference with Pitt 
when Pitt was in bed with the gout, and of his getting into 
a vacant bed and discoursing from thence to his colleague, 
is one of the choicest pictures of his absurdity that survive. 
The two leading Ministers were found storming at each 
other from adjacent couches, disputing as to whether 
Hawke's fleet should put to sea or not. 1 Pitt fortunately 
prevailed. Newcastle's grotesqueness was part of his tem- 
perament, for all through his life his jealousy and suspicion 
kept him in a perpetual froth of nervous excitement. His 
jealousy was of power, his suspicion of those who aimed at 
it. And by power he meant patronage. Throughout his 
long life his god or goddess was patronage. Indeed his 
voluminous correspondence rather resembles the letter-bag 
of an agency for necessitous persons of social position than 
the papers of a Prime Minister or Secretary of State. To 
hold a crowded levee of placehunters, ecclesiastical and 
temporal, to thread his way about it coaxing, fawning, and 
slobbering, embracing and even kissing, promising and pay- 
ing all with the base coin of cozenage, this was Newcastle's 
paradise. But it answered. It made him necessary to his 
party, and therefore necessary to those who would govern 
the country; for government was restricted to his party. 
So all statesmen in turn scorned and employed him. ' His 
name,' said Walpole, 'is perfidy.' But perfidy paid, and 
Walpole kept him to the end, fully aware that he was always 
ready for betrayal if expediency dictated it, and that in the 
closing months he was in fact busy at the work. At last, 
indeed, Walpole himself, under the name of the King, com- 
missioned him to intrigue officially. Hardwicke, perhaps 
the greatest of our Chancellors, who furnished the brains 
for Newcastle, and condescended to act as his mentor and 

1 Dutens' Voyage, &c, i. 142. 
161 



LORD CHATHAM 

instrument, was joined with him to make terms with the 
enemy, and offer the reversion of the Treasury on condition 
of immunity for Walpole. 

Pulteney was the enemy, or its chief; for he led the 
Opposition, and guided the Court of the Heir Apparent, as 
he had that of the father when Prince of Wales, though 
then without fruit and result. He was also the idol of the 
nation. For long years he had made the people believe that 
Walpole was a Goliath of corruption, and that he was the 
incorruptible David. Moreover, his vast wealth, his ability, 
his eloquence, and his social qualities gave him a personal 
ascendancy apart from his political position. 'He was, 
by all accounts,' writes Shelburne, 'the greatest House 
of Commons orator that had ever appeared,' 1 surpassing 
even the legendary reputation of Bolingbroke ; he was also 
a scholar, a wit, and a potent pamphleteer. In conversation 
he excelled; when the wits were gathered at Stowe, the 
pre-eminence of Pulteney was acknowledged. 2 At this 
moment he was supreme, 'in the greatest point of view,' 
writes Chesterfield, 'that I ever saw any subject in ... . 
the arbiter between the Crown and the people; the former 
imploring his protection, the latter his support ' ; ' possess- 
ing, ' says Glover, ' a degree of popularity and power which 
no subject before him was ever possessed of.' All eyes 
were raised to him with expectant adoration as he stood 
on this pinnacle, and as they gazed they saw him slowly 
totter, and then fall headlong. For the two ministers 
had succeeded in compromising him. He refused, indeed, 
amnesty for Walpole or office for himself; but adulterated 
these refusals by watering his expressions of hostility to the 
minister, and by asking on his own behalf for an earldom 
and a seat in the Cabinet. When his followers found that 
he and Carteret were engaged in secret negotiation with 

1 Life of Shelburne, i. 45. 2 Bishop Newton's Works, i. 93. 

162 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

Ministers, their indignation was unbounded. They held a 
public meeting to disown him. His popularity disappeared 
in an instant and for ever. He afterwards averred that he 
had lost his head, that there was no comprehending or 
describing the confusion that prevailed, and that he was 
obliged to go out of town for three or four days to keep his 
senses. This is not impossible or even improbable. A 
political crisis bursts like a tornado, and bewilders the 
strongest characters. Both rare and happy are the men 
who can on such occasions take counsel with themselves, 
and meet the storm with presence of mind. Pulteney had, 
perhaps, become enervated with a long period of merely 
negative opposition. Glover also asserts that his hand was 
forced by Lyttelton who was secretly offering terms to 
Walpole, and that these, though tendered by the Prince 
of Wales's Secretary, Walpole treated with disdain. Glover 
was an ill-conditioned wasp, and his story refutes itself. 
For the one person whom Walpole was anxious to gain was 
Frederick, even offering to add 50,000/. to his income. 
That he should then have spurned an overture from the 
Prince's right-hand man is out of the question; he would 
have met it more than half-way. Whatever the cause, Pul- 
teney, having committed himself, could not retrace his 
steps ; an iron grip constrained him. In vain did he seek to 
recall his patent and escape his peerage. Walpole held him 
fast. Pulteney had finally conquered in the long struggle of 
twenty years, and overthrown Sir Robert; but the pros- 
trate minister had from the dust worked Pulteney like a 
marionette. 

For behind all these strange scenes Walpole pulled the 
strings. His main object was to avoid his own impeach- 
ment, and this, in spite of the determination of the hostile 
majority which called for his head, he achieved; a feat 
little less than miraculous. The Tory candidates for 

163 



LORD CHATHAM 

office were rejected by the King, and as for the not less bit- 
ter Whigs, 

But bees, on flowers alighting, cease to hum; 
So, settling upon places, Whigs grow dumb. 

They were dumb in spite of themselves. The nation, which 
had been excited by the hope of seeing corruption extin- 
guished, and the advent of a new era of virtue and public 
spirit, was again disappointed. People saw this sublime 
struggle result in a jobbing distribution of such places as 
were vacated to the same sort of people as had vacated 
them, with precisely the same system. It was much the 
same ministry without the one great minister. Fooled 
once more, as so often before and since, people shrugged 
their shoulders, and turned their attention to other things, 
more honest and more practical than party politics. 

With the fall of Walpole this narrative is not otherwise 
concerned, for his successors found no post for Pitt. Two 
members of the Prince of Wales's household, Lords Balti- 
more and Archibald Hamilton, had found acceptance as 
members of the new administration; the King probably 
could not stomach more, certainly not Pitt. For long years 
afterwards he could not endure contact with the orator who 
sneered at him and at Hanover, and who even insinuated 
with factious injustice doubts of his personal courage. It 
must also be remembered that Pitt was not merely attached 
to the party of the Prince but to the group of Cobham. That 
veteran accepted for a short time a seat in the Cabinet and 
the command of a regiment. But his animosity against 
Carteret was second only to his animosity against Walpole. 
Carteret was a powerful, and aimed at being the controlling 
member of the new Government. He therefore succeeded 
to the position of target for the barbed arrows of Pitt and 
his friends which had been vacated by Walpole 's retirement. 

164 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

Carteret, the new object of philippic, had striven hard for 
the succession to Walpole when Pulteney stood aside, but 
had been foiled by Walpole acting through the King. Lord 
Wilmington, whom Horace Walpole describes as a solemn 
debauchee and Hervey as fond only of money and eating, 
but who was the favourite nonentity of George II., had been 
fobbed off upon the party as First Minister ; and the choice 
had its advantages. For, always incapable, he was now 
moribund; and so as a feeble and transient barrier to am- 
bition was the least unacceptable to Walpole 's expectant 
heirs. A figurehead, moreover, was the favourite expe- 
dient of the century for skirting the fierce conflict of per- 
sonalities. 

So Wilmington reigned, and Carteret governed for a 
while in Walpole 's stead. The shadowy form of the First 
Minister could not veil for a moment the bold outline of 
the Secretary of State, for Carteret, though scarcely attain- 
ing real greatness, remains one of the most brilliant and 
striking figures in the eighteenth century. It is almost 
enough to say that in all but disregard of money he was the 
exact antipodes of Newcastle. No man of his time was so 
splendidly equipped for the highest public service as Carteret. 
He was sprung from an ancient Norman family settled in 
Jersey, eight of whom, the father and seven sons, were 
knighted in one day by Edward III. 1 To a person of com- 
manding beauty and an open and engaging demeanour, he 
united superb qualities of intellect developed by ardent 
study. He was a scholar of signal excellence at a time 
when scholarship was in the atmosphere of English states- 
manship, the best Grecian of his day, with the great classics 
always in his mind and at command. Did any one of the 
like taste come to him on business, Carteret would at once 
turn from business to some Homeric discussion. Moreover 

1 Ballantyne's Carteret, 2. 
12 165 



LORD CHATHAM 

he knew the whole Greek Testament by heart; an unusual 
and unsuspected accomplishment. 1 But he was also versed 
in modern languages, then a rare and never a common 
faculty in this island, and alone among his compeers spoke 
German fluently, a priceless advantage under a sovereign 
whose heart and mind were in Hanover. He was the only 
person who was in favour both with the King and with the 
Prince of Wales. 2 He abounded in a wit at once genial and 
penetrating. He was a puissant orator. His comprehen- 
sive grasp of European statecraft, his capacity for taking 
broad and high views, his soaring politics, his intrepid spirit 
and his high ambition, marked him out among the meaner 
men by whom he was surrounded. His contempt of money 
amounted to recklessness. His scorn of all pettiness made 
him disdain jobbery, and even the subtler arts of parlia- 
mentary manipulation. There was much that was sublime 
in him, and more that was impracticable. In a greater 
degree than any other minister of his time, if we except 
Chatham, with whom he had many qualities in common, 
does he seem to partake of the mystery of genius. Un- 
fortunately, his energy came in gusts, he could scarcely 
bring himself to bend, and he was incapable of that self- 
contained patience, amounting to long-suffering, which is a 
necessary condition of the highest success in official life. 
All, indeed, was marred by an extravagance of conduct 
which was in reality the result of his nature running riot and 
of his good qualities carried to excess. He played his polit- 
ical chess with the big pieces alone, and neglected the pawns. 
He disregarded not merely the soldiers and most of the offi- 
cers, but all the arts and equipment of the parliamentary 
army, heedless of the fact that parliamentary support is the 
vital necessity of a British minister. Disdainful of public 
opinion or party connections, he attempted to play the 

Reward's Anecdotes, ii. 280. 2 Marchmont Papers, i. 42, 73. 

166 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

great game in Europe with no resource but his own abilities 
and the confidence of his sovereign, whose antipathy to 
France he shared, and whose policy and prejudices he could 
discuss in the King's native language. And yet over the 
bottle, which he loved at least as much as literature or 
politics, he would laugh at the whole business and the 
men with whom he was engaged. 'What is it to me,' he 
would say, 'who is a judge or who is a bishop? It is my 
business to make Kings and Emperors ' ; and he would have 
to be reminded that those who wanted offices or honours 
would follow and support those who did deal in those com- 
modities. One can hear his jolly laugh. His policy he 
embodied in one striking sentence: 'I want to instil a 
nobler ambition into you, to make you knock the heads of 
the Kings of Europe together, and jumble something out of 
it which may be of service to this country.' As a matter 
*of fact though he did undoubtedly knock together the 
heads of some kings, no material advantage resulted to the 
country. He was, however, a patriot, a single-minded, 
able, jovial, reckless patriot, but out of touch with the poli- 
ticians, unsuited to parliamentary government, and so al- 
most ineffectual. And thus we see him at his best on his 
deathbed, where he quotes to the under-secretary who 
brought him the Treaty of Paris for approval the speech of 
Sarpedon with melancholy emphasis. ' Friend of my soul, 
were we to escape from this war, and then live for ever with- 
out old age or death, I should not fight myself among the 
foremost, nor would I send thee into the glorifying battle ; 
but a thousand fates of death stand over us, which mortal 
man may not flee from and avoid ; then let us on. ' These 
last words he repeated with calm and determined resigna- 
tion, and after a pause of some minutes desired the prelim- 
inary articles of the Peace of Paris to be read to him. After 
hearing these at length he desired that, to use own words, the 

167 



LORD CHATHAM 

approbation of a dying statesman might be declared to the 
most glorious war and the most honourable peace that this 
nation ever saw. 1 The news of his extremity had reached 
Chesterfield. 'When he dies,' wrote this shrewdest judge 
and observer of mankind in England, who had in his factious 
days called Carteret 'a wild and drunken minister,' 2 'the 
ablest head in England dies too, take it for all in all.' 3 

Pitt soon had an opportunity of showing that the selec- 
tion of ministers from the Prince's household had left out 
the one priceless force. For now there came raining into 
Parliament imperative demands for the impeachment of 
the fallen Minister. These representations from the various 
constituencies to their several members are well worth 
consideration, for they emphasise identical demands with 
a unanimity suggestive of much later forms of political 
organization. They denounce Standing Armies, and Sep- 
tennial Parliaments, asking that Triennial Parliaments, ' at 
least,' may be restored; they require that placemen largely, 
and pensioners entirely, shall be excluded from the House 
of Commons ; and that laws shall be passed for the security 
and encouragement of the linen trade. In an even more 
sanguine spirit they stipulate for the extirpation of those 
party distractions 'which, though their foundations have 
long ceased to exist, were yet so industriously fomented 
among us, in order to serve the mischievous purposes of 
a ministerial tyranny.' But first and last, and above all, 
they insist on the punishment of Walpole, bringing him 
and his colleagues, which of course meant him, to ' condign 
punishment. ' ' Nothing but the most rigorous justice 
ought to avenge an injured people. . . . Justice is a duty 
we owe to posterity.' 'We have a right to speak plainly 
to you, and we must tell you, Sir, that if the man that 

1 Wood's Essay on the Original Genius of Homer, p. vii. n. (Ed. 1775). 
« Chesterfield, v. 65. 'Chesterfield's Letters, iv. 358. 

168 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

ruined our trade, disgraced our arms, plundered our treasure, 
negotiated away our interests, impoverished the land — in 
a word, the author of all the disgraces and calamities of 
twenty years should (while the whole nation is calling out 
for justice against him) triumph in impunity, we shall be 
apt to think our constitution is lost.' 'Lenity to him 
would be cruelty to the nation.' 1 Our ancestors, it will be 
seen, did not wage their political warfare with the sweet- 
meats or roses of a carnival contest. 

It seems unnecessary to remark that of these various 
injunctions the only one to which the members of Parlia- 
ment paid any heed was that for the prosecution or perse- 
cution of Walpole. Even here there was no result. The 
new officials were sated and at ease, the hungry remnant 
was insufficient or inept. But the constituencies were in 
deadly earnest, if their members were not. They had been 
goaded by their leaders to a state bordering on frenzy, and 
their demands, vindictive as they may appear to us, only 
embodied the declamation of the Opposition throughout 
half at least of Walpole 's ministry. More than ten years 
before, Pulteney had publicly declared that ' the Opposition 
had come to a determined resolution not to listen to any 
treaty whatsoever, or from whomsoever it may come, in 
which the first and principal condition should not be to 
deliver him (Walpole) up to the justice of the country.' 
But now the Opposition was in power, and Pulteney was in 
a chastened and moderate mood. His star, indeed, was 
already on the wane ; he was on the high road to the earldom 
of Bath and extinction At the first meeting indeed with 
the King's envoys he had declared in a famous phrase that 
he could not screen Walpole if he would, for ' the heads of 
parties are like the heads of snakes, which are carried on by 
their tails. ' But at a later conference he said, with reference 

1 Pari. Hist. xii. 416-427. 
169 



LORD CHATHAM 

to the same topic, that he was not a man of blood, and that 
in all his expressions importing a resolution to pursue the 
minister to destruction he meant only the destruction of his 
power, not his person. He would consult with his friends, 
yet must confess that so many years of maladministration 
deserved some parliamentary censure. 

Accordingly Lord Limerick moved on March 9 (1742) 
for a select committee of inquiry into the administration 
of the late Sir Robert Walpole during the last twenty years ; 
but Pulteney did not at first countenance this moderate 
measure He was absent, on a reasonable excuse no doubt, 
and in his absence his friends intimated that it would not 
be disagreeable to him were the motion rejected. 

This was, it seems, untrue, but it gave Pitt the first 
great opportunity of his life. When others were silenced 
by office or honours, he stood forth as the mouthpiece of the 
people and as the consistent, incorruptible maintainer of 
the policy and declarations of his party. It was an oppor- 
tunity of which he availed himself with terrible effect. It 
is now, we think, that he first appealed to the imagination 
and confidence of the nation, as distinguished from the 
appreciation of Parliament, though that also was sufficiently 
marked. 'Pitt grows the most popular speaker in the 
House of Commons, and is at the head of his party, ' writes 
Philip to Joseph Yorke. 1 

Owing to the absence, and so the presumed indifference 
or disapproval of Pulteney, Lord Limerick's motion was 
rejected by two votes. At the request of Pulteney, how- 
ever, who, whether lukewarm or not, was nettled at the 
natural criticisms provoked by his attitude, Lord Limerick 
brought forward another motion of the same kind limited 
to the last ten years of Walpole 's administration. Pulteney 
who, discredited outside, retained within the House 'a 

1 Harris, ii. 31. 
170 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

miraculous influence,' exerted himself to the utmost, we 
may be sure, but it can scarcely be doubted that the hon- 
ours of the double debate rested with the vehement and 
untainted Pitt. It is not perhaps of much use to quote 
from the vague and imperfect reports of his speeches, but 
we can gather, at least, their general trend. One passage, 
at any rate, in his speech on the second motion, has been 
authentically preserved by Horace Walpole, for it was a 
compliment to himself. Horace had defended his father with 
a grace and filial duty that commended him to the House. 
Pitt, in reply, said that it was becoming in the young man 
to remember that he was the child of the accused, the 
House should remember that they were the children of their 
country, a flight which seems to outstep the perilous limits 
of the sublime. 

From the summary of Pitt's two speeches we may at 
least gather that he had much the best of the argument 
on this issue, so long dead and buried. One noteworthy 
point, however, in his declamation against the minister, 
is that he paid vindictive attention to Walpole 's practice 
of dismissing and cashiering his opponents, by which he had 
himself suffered. He argued that the King might as well dis- 
pose of all the property of his subjects as of that particular 
form of property represented by commissions in the army ; 
which, whether obtained by service or by purchase, were as 
freehold as an estate, and should be as amply secured. 1 

But, in truth, his denunciation of Walpole is much 
less remarkable than the poisoned shafts which, as is 
manifest even in the faulty report, he aimed at the King, 
or at Hanover, which was much the same thing. He 
declared that the changes were unreal, that Walpole re- 
mained minister behind the scenes. 'Though he be re- 
moved from the Treasury,' said Pitt, 'he is not from the 

1 Pari. Hist. xii. 561. 
171 



LORD CHATHAM 

King's closet, nor probably will be, unless by our advice or 
by our sending him to a lodging at the other end of the 
town, where he cannot do so much harm to his country. ' l 
This pointed hint at the Tower must have been greatly to 
the taste of his audience. Allusions to the debts of the 
Civil List, caused certainly not by hospitality or by ex- 
penditure on any public object, but inferentially by corrup- 
tion, were artfully framed so as to cause the King the 
greatest possible annoyance; 2 so, too, were the innuendoes 
as to our foreign policy having been framed in the sole 
interests of Hanover. Lord Limerick's second motion was 
carried by seven votes, and Pitt was named on the secret 
committee, which, however, owing to the loyal silence of 
Walpole's associates, to the placing one of them in the 
privileged security of the House of Lords, and to the refusal 
of the King to allow disclosures as to the manner in which 
secret service money had been employed, came to a futile 
and inglorious end. We catch one glimpse of Pitt in its 
proceedings. Scrope, the doughty old Secretary of the 
Treasury, who had fought under Monmouth at Sedgemoor, 
refused to reply to the questions of the inquisitors. Pitt 
seems to have pushed him hard, and he was so stung that he 
wished to call his tormentor out. From this we may at 
least infer that Pitt took a leading part in the deliberations 
of the Committee. On the other hand, it may be noticed 
that he only received 259, or one more than the lowest 
number of votes, while the member who headed the poll 
scored 518, a circumstance which would seem to indicate 
that he had as yet no strong position in the House. 

He soon had the opportunity of further exasperating the 
King, an opportunity of which he availed himself rather with 
the intemperance of resentment than with the astuteness of 
ambition; for he was now in declared opposition to the new 

1 Pari. Hist. xii. 488. * lb. xii. 490. 

172 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

Government, and as bitter against Carteret as he had been 
against Walpole. When Parliament met (November 16, 
1742) after the recess, Pitt 'spoke like ten thousand angels,' 
but no trace of his speech remains. Of its spirit, however, 
we can judge from that which he delivered on December 10, 
on the vote for continuing the British troops in Flanders. 
Here the onslaught was against the King, and it is scarcely 
possible to conceive sarcasms more calculated to afflict 
the sovereign in his tenderest susceptibilities than those 
which Pitt now launched, even as we read them in an im- 
perfect report ; they are, indeed, so masterly in this way as 
almost to prove their authenticity. This is the first speech 
of real point and power delivered by Pitt of which we have 
any record. It may be noted in passing, that in the London 
Magazine (one of the two newspapers that reported debates) 
Pitt's speech was unnoticed, while it did not appear in the 
Gentleman's Magazine till fourteen months after it was 
delivered. 1 

A few specimens may give a fair idea of the power which 
made Pitt so dreaded. 

1 The troops of Hanover, whom we are now expected to 
pay, marched into the Low Countries, where they still 
remain. They marched to the place most distant from the 
enemy, least in danger of an attack, and most strongly for- 
tified had an attack been designed. They have, therefore, 
no other claim to be paid than that they left their own 
country for a place of greater security. I shall not, there- 
fore, be surprised, after such another glorious campaign 
.... to be told that the money of this nation cannot be 
more properly employed than in hiring Hanoverians to eat 
and sleep.' 2 

1 As to Hanover, ' he continues, ' we know by experience 
that none of the merits of that Electorate are passed over in 

1 Pari. Hist. xii. 940 note. 2 lb. xii. 1033. 

173 



LORD CHATHAM 

silence. ' ' It is not to be imagined that His Majesty would 
not have sent his proportion of troops to the Austrian army 
had not the temptation of greater profit been laid indus- 
triously before him.' 'It is now too apparent that this 
powerful, this great, this mighty nation is considered only as 
a province to a despicable electorate, and that, in conse- 
quence of a plan formed long ago and invariably pursued, 
these [Hanoverian] troops are hired only to drain us of our 
money. . . . How much reason the transactions of almost 
every year have given for suspecting this absurd, ungrateful, 
and perfidious partiality it is not necessary to declare. . . . 
To dwell upon all the instances of partiality which have 
been shown, and the yearly visits which have been paid to 
that delightful country [Hanover], to reckon up all the sums 
that have been spent to aggrandise and enrich it, would be an 
irksome and invidious task, invidious to those who are 
afraid to be told the truth, and irksome to those who are 
unwilling to hear of the dishonour and injuries of their 
country. I shall, however, dwell no longer on this unpleas- 
ing subject than to express my hope that we shall no longer 
suffer ourselves to be deceived and oppressed.' 

Conceive the position. On the one side a King, born 
and bred in Hanover, to whom the honour and welfare of 
Hanover and the Hanoverians were everything, whose para- 
dise was Hanover, who counted the days to his annual visit 
to Hanover as a schoolboy counts the days to his holidays, 
who held Hanover as his own absolute monarchy and 
property as compared with the limited interest and power 
of the British throne; a King, moreover, courted by all, 
whose favour was necessary for the obtaining of office; ac- 
customed to unstinted adulation and homage. On the other, 
this young jackanapes, an official in the court of his detested 
son, declaiming against him with every art of the actor and 
the rhetorician, with every power of voice and eye, holding 

174 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

him and his Hanover up to every kind of ridicule and con- 
tempt, before an audience mainly of place-hunters and place- 
holders, half trembling, half chuckling, as the philippic 
proceeded. 

Why did Pitt take this line? If he wished for office (as 
he undoubtedly did) , it seemed madness : he was committing 
something like suicide. But pique, as Sir George Savile 
well said, 'is the spur the devil rides the noblest tempers 
with.' He was unquestionably angry at his exclusion from 
office, which he had, no doubt, been told was due to the 
King. He was justly indignant that- the long-continued 
efforts which had resulted in the overflow of Walpole's 
overweening power had simply resulted in the shuffle of a 
few offices, and that to the victors the spoil had been 
denied; the sole and execrable minister Walpole had been 
replaced by a much less sole but not less execrable minister 
in Carteret. All this was gall to a man who had been among 
the most formidable in the heat of battle. That heat 
was now over, and the vanquished were picnicking with a 
few selected victors, while Pitt and his friends were left to 
cool themselves on the deserted battlefield. ' They tell me, ' 
said Lord George Bentinck, in 1846, 'that I shall save 
fifteen hundred a year by Free Trade. I don't care for that. 
What I cannot bear is being sold.' Pitt, too, could not 
bear being sold. 

That pique and a not ignoble rage had much to do with 
this philippic we may well assume. But we may also 
surmise that his attitude was not devoid of calculation. 
The veto of George II. was not to be removed by deference, 
so he would, like another Hannibal, destroy the obstacle 
with vinegar. The King had been exasperated by the lam- 
bent play of Pitt's earlier insinuations; he should be made 
to know how Pitt had then held his hand, what thunder- 
bolts he had kept in reserve, what unspeakable things 

i7S 



LORD CHATHAM 

awaited the Prince who should frown on him. 'All the 
things I have told you,' said Sancho Panza, ' are tarts and 
cheese-cakes to what remains behind.' George II. should 
learn that the innuendoes that Pitt had levelled at him 
before were tarts and cheese-cakes compared to what he 
had the power of producing. Pitt, in a word, had made 
up his mind that his only means of achieving his objects 
was by terror. He had thrown away the scabbard. More- 
over, he was appealing from the Court to the people. The 
Court was foreign, immoral, and unpopular: the very name 
of Hanover was detested. And although Pitt's actual words 
reached the people late or not at all, there was an echo 
which was audible, and made known all through the three 
kingdoms that there was within the walls of Parliament an 
intrepid, unbribed, perhaps incorruptible orator who feared 
the face of no man, and who was embodying in fiery words 
the antipathies and distrusts of the nation. 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 



CHAPTER VIII 

ET us consider for a moment the character of the Sov- 
ereign whom Pitt had set himself to bait. 

George II. was first and fundamentally a German prince 
of his epoch. What other could he be? And these mag- 
nates all aped Louis XIV. as their model. They built 
huge palaces, as like Versailles as their means would permit, 
and generally beyond those limits, with fountains and 
avenues and dismally wide paths. Even in our own day a 
German monarch has left, fortunately unfinished, an ac- 
curate Versailles on a damp island in a Bavarian lake. In 
these grandiose structures they cherished a blighting eti- 
quette, and led lives as dull as those of the aged and torpid 
carp in their own stew-ponds. Then, at the proper season, 
they would break away into the forest and kill game. 
Moreover, still in imitation of their model, they held, as a 
necessary feature in the dreary drama of their existence, 
ponderous dalliance with unattractive mistresses, in whom 
they fondly tried to discern the charms of a Montes- 
pan or a La Valliere. This monotonous programme, some- 
times varied by a violent contest whether they should 
occupy a seat with or without a back, or with or without 
arms, represented the even tenor of their lives. 

George II. was better than this training would suggest. 
His first ambition indeed was to be a Lovelace, but his 
second was to be a soldier. As a soldier he had the un- 
affected courage of the princes of his race. George, red 
and angry, fighting on foot at the battle of Dettingen, is 

177 



LORD CHATHAM 

a figure that is memorable and congenial to his British 
subjects. 

As a Lovelace he lives to this day, for his portraits are 
generally in the posture of a coxcomb, with his face in 
outline wearing an irresistible smile, only comical to the 
beholder now, but with which he goes smirking into the 
eternities. It is not necessary to dwell on this part of his 
character; after all, a shallow part, for the one woman 
whom he loved was his wife. It was, however, a necessary 
part, vital to his conception of an ideal monarch. His 
confidences to his wife on this delicate point, though gross 
to us, seemed natural to him and to her, and were probably 
not alien to the atmosphere in which he was reared. Withal 
he bored his mistresses to death, and not impossibly they 
bored him. But that did not matter; the thing had to be 
done ; he saw himself as in a mirror the fourteenth or fifteenth 
Louis; and when on the Saturdays in summer he drove 
down with Lady Yarmouth and his court to Richmond, 
escorted by Lifeguards kicking up the dust, to walk an 
hour in the garden, dine, and return to London, he imagined 
himself, as Horace Walpole tells us, the most gallant and 
lively prince in Europe ! x 

We must admit then that he was born and bred a cox- 
comb, like his son. That he was a fond father no one will 
allege. His pleasures were coarse and dull. Even here one 
strange exception must be made. His letters to women, 
in the opinion of hostile critics, were tender and even exqui- 
site. 3 How he came to write them we cannot know, for his 
character could not make one expect a grace of this kind. 

In other respects we think him underrated. Sir Robert 
Walpole said that politically he was a coward. To what 
does this charge really amount? That a prince who had 
never left Germany till he was thirty-one, who succeeded 

1 Orford Rem., 97. 2 Hervey, ii. 182, 228. 

178 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

to the throne when he was forty-four, after a life of such 
severe repression that his father even entertained the idea 
of transporting him to the plantations, should display that 
familiarity with his position, his political relations, and a 
strange nation, which alone could justify the independent 
action which is implied by the phrase 'political courage,' 
would have been astonishing ; it would indeed have savoured 
of political recklessness. Walpole may have uttered the 
charge in resentment for some refusal of the King's. He 
was, we know, irritated at the moment by finding that the 
King had promised to go to Hanover without informing 
him. The King no doubt blustered in private when he 
yielded in public. But domestic effervescence was the only 
method of relief for a Sovereign who knew his own limita- 
tions, and who also knew that, constitutionally, he would 
have at last to yield to his minister. What is 'political 
courage ' in a constitutional Sovereign ? What would Wal- 
pole have said had the monarch shown 'political courage' 
and insisted on having his own stubborn way ? ' Had he, ' 
wrote Waldegrave, with his usual good sense, ' always been 
as firm and undaunted in the Closet as he showed himself 
at Oudenarde and Dettingen, he might not have proved 
quite as good a king in this limited monarchy. ' 

His foible, we are told, was avarice. We do not know 
that he was mean in his personal expenditure. Waldegrave, 
again, who was fair, and knew him better than most men, 
declared that ' he was always just, and sometimes charitable, 
though rarely generous. ' He amused himself, we are told, 
with counting his guineas in private. That perhaps was 
not a very royal occupation, though a nursery rhyme indi- 
cates that it is; it may have been a trick learned when he 
was poor, or it may have been his substitute for those games 
of anxious futility now known as 'patience.' But the real 
ground for the charge of avarice in the eyes of his British 

J 79 



LORD CHATHAM 

subjects was that he accumulated a great treasure in 
Hanover. If that be avarice, it was the avarice of the 
kings who made Prussia, the famous Frederick and his 
father. Parsimony in such cases may well be a virtue; 
and subjects may even prefer to be ruled by those who 
possess it rather than by princes who rear vast and idle 
palaces like the Bourbons of Spain and Naples, or live with 
unbridled extravagance like George IV. But kings rarely 
hit the right mean; if they are generous they are called 
profuse, if they are careful they are called mean. George's 
avarice, if such it was, was a public-spirited avarice. He 
hoarded for his own beloved country, he got as much out 
of his Kingdom as he could for his Electorate ; for he was a 
Hanoverian first and a Briton a long way afterwards. But 
when Hanover needed it, he spent all his hoards on her 
behalf ungrudgingly, and died poor. 

We do not claim him as a great King, far from it. But 
we think him unjustly and hastily condemned? It is easy 
in a slapdash manner to lavish sarcasms on a King who 
presented many tempting opportunities for satire. The 
genius of Thackeray could not resist them, small blame to 
it. But the King's absurdities should not blind one to his 
merits. The just critic must recognise in George II. a 
constant substantial shrewdness, seasoned with humour. 
His sagacity made him realise his constitutional limitations ; 
his penetration appraised with great justice the men by 
whom he was surrounded; he had to do much that he 
disliked and resented, but he did it when he saw that it 
was necessary, not gracefully, for he was never graceful, 
but without scandal. His rough common sense constantly 
vented itself in the ejaculation of 'Stuff and nonsense,' 1 
which proved his command of at least one British idiom, 
and not unfrequently a just appreciation of affairs. His 

1 Holdernesse to Newcastle, Nov. 22, 1756. Add. MSS. 32869. 

180 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

judgment of men was sure. He had only three ministers 
who were men of commanding ability; Walpole, Carteret, 
and Pitt. Two of these were his especial favourites; to 
the third, who had mortally offended him, he submitted. 
For Newcastle he had a supreme contempt; but wisely 
accommodated himself to one who was useful, who ' did his 
business, ' to whom he was accustomed, and whom he knew 
through and through. He infinitely preferred Carteret to 
Pelham, but at the supreme moment he chose Pelham in 
spite of Carteret. No doubt this was due largely to the 
influence of Walpole, but many kings would not have fol- 
lowed an advice so contrary to their own bias. He piqued 
himself on his knowledge of mankind, not without reason, 
and Hervey 'depicts a scene where he reels off a catalogue 
of names, and the King, tersely and unhesitatingly, gives 
the character of each. 

The fact is that George II. had the misfortune to keep 
in his inmost circle a vigilant and deadly enemy. John 
Lord Hervey, the Sporus of Pope's blighting satire, akin in 
mind and probably in blood to Horace Walpole, was always 
with him; noting down, with spruce rancour, a venomous 
pen, and some dramatic power, the random outbreaks of 
his master. It is not wise to attribute literal exactitude or 
even general veracity to such chronicles; the man who can 
commit so gross a breach of confidence is little worthy of 
trust. That Hervey in the very heart of the King's family 
should have sate down with a pen dipped in vitriol to por- 
tray its most intimate aspects is perhaps our gain but his 
disgrace. He was a viper warmed in the bosom of the 
Court, and stung it to the full extent of his opportunity 
and powers. A court is considered fair game by such 
reptiles. But it is hard to see why princes, who after all are 
human beings, should not be allowed to some extent the 
same sanctity of family life which humbler human beings 

13 181 



LORD CHATHAM 

claim and maintain. Hervey was the intimate associate of 
the King, the confidential friend of the Queen, the lover of 
one of their daughters; he was the tame cat of the family- 
circle. He thought it seemly to narrate their secrets in so 
brutal a fashion that some more decent member of his family 
tore out and destroyed the coarsest and bitterest passages. 
What remains is coarse and bitter enough. It shows the 
King and Queen in a most unfavourable light. But that 
aspect is fascinating compared to that in which he presents 
himself. The story of royalty should not be a Court Cir- 
cular; but neither should it be a lampoon, written by a 
trusted friend. The only excuse for him is that being 
devoted to the Queen, who in her way merited his devotion, 
he detested the King whom he deemed unworthy of her. 
But that does not help the reader who looks to him for 
facts. The George II. we know is the George II. of Hervey, 
and Hervey 's Journal proves the writer to be unworthy of 
implicit credence. 

Chesterfield also drew a character of the King. But when 
we discount Chesterfield's studied epigrams, poised with 
the malignant nicety of one who hated his subject, there is 
not much left for discredit. 

The real crime of George II. in the eyes of his British 
subjects was almost in the category of virtues, for it was 
his devotion to Hanover. Innocent and natural as it was 
in him, it seems wonderful to us that our fathers should have 
endured it. How they must have hated Popery! But 
Hanover was the King's home and fatherland; all his 
pleasant associations were with Hanover; there he was 
absolute Sovereign, and could lead without criticism the 
life that he enjoyed. He could not help being a Hanoverian 
any more than William III. could help being a Hollander. 
The English chose their Dutch and Hanoverian Sovereigns 
with their eyes open, and had no right to complain if what 

182 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

they desired and obtained was somewhat bitter in digestion. 
Neither William nor the two first Georges ever professed 
to be other than what they were ; they never for a moment 
simulated that they were English, they never pretended to 
like England. 'He hated the English,' says Lord Hervey 
of George II. And when at the first available instant they 
fled from Kensington and Hampton Court to Loo or Herren- 
hausen, their English subjects ignored the mortifying pref- 
erence, from devotion no doubt to the Protestant Succession; 
but partly also because these monarchs were profoundly 
indifferent to them. With George II., it is true, these ex- 
cursions were accompanied, as in Shakespeare, by alarms; 
alarms only too well founded that he would return with a 
pocket full of treaties for subsidies which the British tax- 
payer would have to pay. But all these three kings accu- 
rately understood their position. They knew that they were 
not chosen from affection, or for their qualities, certainly 
not for their attractions. They were taken as necessities, 
almost odious necessities, to keep out a Romanist dynasty 
which represented something to the people that was more 
odious still. 

They entertained, then, no illusions; a bargain had been 
driven with them and they would keep it ; they gave their 
pound, or more, of flesh. They would occupy palaces, 
receive civil lists, interview ministers, and keep out the 
Pretender. But that did not imply a perpetual exile from 
home; they intended to get as many holidays as possible; 
and they did. They might be a hateful necessity for Eng- 
land, but England as a necessity was almost as hateful to 
them. Their life in this island was servitude, more or less 
penal ; they only breathed by the dykes of Holland or the 
waters of the Leine. If this be clearly understood, much 
confusion and vituperation may be avoided. But the 
wonder is that the English (for the Scots and Irish had little 

183 



LORD CHATHAM 

to do with it) should have had the civic courage in the 
cause of religion and liberty to endure the compact. 

George II. then, we contend, putting his private life 
apart, which we must judge by the German standard of 
those days, was not a bad King under the conditions of his 
time and of his throne. He was perhaps the best of the 
Georges; better than George I. or George IV., better as a 
King than George III., though inferior no doubt in the 
domestic virtues. All things considered, it is wonderful 
that he was as good as he was, and he scarcely deserves 
the thoughtless opprobrium which he has incurred. 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 



CHAPTER IX 

AND now it is necessary to say a word of Continental 
/V affairs. 

A life of Pitt should concern itself with Pitt alone, or 
with the persons and events immediately relating to him. 
But as during this period of his life foreign policy was all 
in all, and Britain seemed a mere anxious appendage to 
the Continent, it is necessary to give a succinct sketch of 
the familiar but complicated sequence of events in Europe 
which occurred at this time, and which inspired almost all 
the debates in which Pitt took part. 

Walpole, as we have seen, had declared war against 
Spain in 1739, and the not very glorious course of those 
operations does not call for record. But the year 1740 
marked a new and critical epoch. Death in those few 
months was busy lopping off the crowned heads of Europe, 
as if to clear the scene for two great figures. On February 
6th died Pope Clement XII. On March 31st died the 
shrewd but brutal boor Frederick William I., and at the 
age of twenty-eight his son Frederick II. reigned in his 
stead. His accession was to unveil a mystery; and where 
mankind had hitherto seen a fiddling dilettante, contempt- 
uous of his countrymen and craving for all that was French, 
to reveal the direct ancestor of German unity, the most 
practical and tenacious of conquerors. On October 20th 
the Emperor Charles VI., the figure-head for which we had 
fought in the War of the Succession, and, a week afterwards, 
Anne the Empress of Russia passed away. Rarely has the 

185 



LORD CHATHAM 

sickle of Eternity gathered so pompous a harvest. Be- 
tween February and November it had garnered the Holy 
Roman Emperor, the Holy Roman Pontiff, the sovereign 
of Russia, and the sovereign of Prussia. Of these the death 
at Vienna was by far the most momentous. For Charles 
left behind him no son, but a young daughter of twenty- 
three, about to be a mother, whose succession he had at- 
tempted to secure by the Pragmatic Sanction of 1718, rati- 
fied and recognised by solemn international instruments. 
On the morning of his death she was promptly proclaimed 
sovereign of her father's dominions, but her treasury was 
empty and her ministers paralysed. Bavaria at once pro- 
tested. Behind Bavaria stood Frederick armed to the teeth, 
eager to let slip the dogs of war. Every one saw his prepa- 
rations; no one could tell at whom they were aimed. 

'No fair judge,' Mr. Carlyle 1 tells us, can blame the 
1 young magnanimous King ' for seizing this ' flaming oppor- 
tunity.' The point is fortunately not one which a biog- 
rapher of Pitt is called upon to discuss, except to note that 
hero-worship makes bad history. For our purpose it is 
sufficient to say that Frederick did avail himself of the new 
juncture of affairs. Charles had died on October 20; on 
December 6 the announcement was officially made in Berlin 
that the King had resolved to march a body of troops into 
Silesia; on December 13 these had passed the frontier, not as 
enemies of the Queen of Hungary or Silesia, it was declared, 
but as protective friends of Silesia and her Majesty's rights 
there. All this was preceded and accompanied by the 
strangest diplomacy that the world had seen, but which does 
not concern this abstract. Thus begins the first period of 
the Continental war. 

Britain, like Prussia, was bound by treaty to maintain 
the Pragmatic Sanction which assured the Austrian domin- 

1 Frederick, iii. 141. 
186 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

ions to Maria Theresa. Our statesmen at this moment were 
engaged in a pastime of more immediate interest and excite- 
ment, for they were hunting Walpole to death ; the exhaus- 
tion of the quarry was evident ; the end could not be far off. 
But even then the nature of the aggression and the appeal 
of a young and beautiful Queen exercised the usual influence 
on the chivalrous sympathies of the nation. Maria Theresa 
could, moreover, appeal to treaty rights. So that Walpole 
found himself reluctantly forced into a new war while the 
former was still undecided and unsatisfied. He agreed to 
renew the pledges of England to maintain that Pragmatic 
Sanction which secured the succession to the daughter of 
Charles VI. ; he agreed, moreover, to an immediate subsidy 
of 300,000/., and to sending a force of 12,000 men. Mean- 
while Marshal Schwerin had defeated the Austrians at Mol- 
witz at the very moment that the House of Commons was 
debating these proposals. 

This victory brought into the arena new and eager 
claimants for some part of the Austrian spoils, now appar- 
ently so available. The eminent guarantors of the integ- 
rity of Austria were suddenly transformed into hungry 
schemers for her immediate partition. Spain, Sardinia, and 
Poland-Saxony all advanced pretensions. But a mightier 
enemy was preparing to join hands with Frederick and take 
the field, for it was scarcely to be supposed that the secular 
enemy of the House of Hapsburg could remain quiescent 
at such a moment. France saw a unique opportunity for 
breaking up the Austrian dominions, and reducing the por- 
tion reserved to the young Queen to comparative insignifi- 
cance. In France, as in England, the minister was peaceful, 
but the party of war carried the day. Two French armies 
of 40,000 men each crossed the Rhine in August 1741. One 
under Marshal Maillebois marched on Hanover. The ruler 
of that State, who, as sovereign of Great Britain, was the 

187 



LORD CHATHAM 

active ally of Maria Theresa, hastily concluded a treaty of 
neutrality for one year, promising to give no assistance to 
the young Queen in his Hanoverian capacity, and to refrain 
from voting for her husband as Emperor. For this treaty 
George II. was violently attacked by his British subjects, 
who believed themselves to be fighting for Hanoverian in- 
terests, while Hanover itself was thus snugly removed into 
a haven of peace. The censure was, we think, excessive, 
if not undeserved. The treaty did indeed accentuate the 
duality which somewhat unequally divided the person of 
George. But if that be once conceded, it must be admitted 
that he was right as Elector to do his very best for Hanover, 
just as King he was bound to do his very best for England. 
As Elector, then, he was fully justified in keeping his de- 
fenceless State out of the devastation of war, from which it 
was destined to suffer so terribly sixteen years later from 
another French army under the Duke of Richelieu, when 
neutrality was no longer possible. 

While Maillebois marched towards Hanover, the other 
army, under Marshals Belleisle and Broglie, marched through 
Bavaria and menaced Vienna. Maria Theresa had to fly to 
Hungary, and appeal in a manner made familiar by descrip- 
tion to the chivalry of the Magyars. The Elector of Bavaria, 
who was the figure-head chosen by the confederates for the 
imperial throne, and who had his fill of titles in the lack of 
more substantial fare, was proclaimed Archduke of Austria 
at Linz, King of Bohemia in Prague, and soon afterwards 
Emperor in Frankfort. It seemed as if a vast partition was 
about to take place, and the House of Austria destined to 
disappear. 

But this was the turning-point ; in the general blackness 
there appeared rays of hope for Maria Theresa. Walpole, 
the peace minister, disappeared, and the control of Foreign 
Affairs in Great Britain passed to Carteret, who was warm 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

for Austria, and eager to play an active part on the Con- 
tinent. Moreover, the misfortunes of the Queen roused the 
enthusiasm of Great Britain. Five millions were voted for 
the war, half a million as a subsidy to the Queen of Hungary. 
Sixteen thousand men were sent into Flanders to assist the 
exertions of the Dutch. Unfortunately there were no exer- 
tions to assist, and our troops remained useless. Our fleets 
were more active. They harried the Spaniards and con- 
trolled the Mediterranean. A squadron entered the Bay of 
Naples and gave the King, afterwards Charles III. of Spain, 
an hour in which to decide whether he would abandon the 
confederacy against Austria or see his beautiful city bom- 
barded. The King of Naples yielded, but as King of Spain 
never forgave the English for this humiliation. 

The Austrians, too, found a bold and skilful general in 
Khevenhuller, who seized Bavaria and occupied Munich on 
the very day on which its ruler was crowned Emperor. In Feb. 12, 1742 
the succeeding June a peace, which proved afterwards to be 
but a truce, was concluded at Breslau between Austria and 
Prussia, through the mediation of Great Britain, and fol- 
lowed by the Treaty of Berlin, to which George II. both as 
King and Elector, the Empress of Russia, the States General, 
and the King of Poland as Elector, of Saxony were parties. 
There had been a secret armistice between the two states 
in the winter of 174 1, by which Lower Silesia and Niesse had 
been ceded to Frederick, but this had soon proved inop- 
erative. A new situation was however produced by the 
severe battle of Chotusitz, in which the Austrians suffered 
defeat at the hands of Frederick. Maria Theresa now 
yielded to the pressure of the English ministry and ceded all 
Lower and part of Upper Silesia with the county of Glatz to 
Frederick, who in return abandoned his allies and left the 
French to themselves, on the plea that they were in secret 
communication with Vienna. Saxony, under his influence, 

189 



LORD CHATHAM 

also withdrew from the war, and the King of Prussia and 
the Elector of Hanover concluded a defensive alliance, the 
Elector guaranteeing Silesia and Glatz to the King. Fred- 
erick saw that he had been too successful. He was deter- 
mined to retain Silesia, but he saw with apprehension great 
French armies overrunning the German Empire. That 
France should be aggrandised at the expense of Germany- 
was no part of his policy. For Germany as Germany he had 
no natural affection; but^he waters of Germany, however 
troubled they might be, he proposed to keep for his own 
fishing. 

With the Peace of Breslau, then, the first period of the 
war ends, and the second begins, in which it assumes a new 
character. It is not Frederick and France fighting against 
Austria; it is Austria supported by Britain, and to some 
extent Holland, fighting, with the secret sympathy of Ger- 
many, against France and Spain. Elizabeth, too, the> 
daughter of Peter the Great, had mounted the throne of 
Dec, i 74I Russia, and assisted her sister sovereign with sympathy and 
with money. The whole aspect of the war was suddenly 
changed. Austria was now free to turn her whole forces on 
France, and she did so with terrible effect. The French had 
to evacuate Bohemia in a retreat so heroic and so appalling 
that it anticipated the horrors of 1812. Of the 40,000 men 
with whom he had crossed the Rhine, Belleisle brought back 
but 8000 into France. The share of Great Britain became 
substantial and direct. The Elector of Hanover, relieved 
from apprehension by his treaty with Prussia and the success 
of Austria, reduced his army by 16,000 men, but the King 
of England took them into his pay. This measure ex- 
asperated his British subjects, whose attention was thus once 
more called to the jarring interests of the Kingdom and the 
Electorate combined in George's person. But Ministers 
carried the day, and in June, 1743, the King himself took 

190 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

the field with an Anglo-German army of some 40,000 men 
under the command of Lord Stair. At Dettingen, not far 
from Frankfort, in escaping from a position of extreme 
jeopardy, they encountered and defeated the French. The 
strangest part of this engagement was that there was then 
nominally no war between France and Great Britain, and 
that these operations were only accidental auxiliary conflicts. 
It was not for nine months afterwards that war between the 
two countries was formally declared. 

Later on in this year George II.. took an even more se P t.,i 7 43 
active measure, and through Carteret, as Secretary of State, 
though behind the back of .his other ministers, signed the 
Treaty of Worms. For many years past it had been the 
policy of the House of Savoy to put itself up to auction, and 
by the Treaty of Worms George II. became the successful 
bidder. The King of Sardinia was to receive some territory 
from Austria, and 200,000/. a year from Great Britain, while 
he was to assist the Austrian cause with 45,000 men. Car- 
teret at the same time covenanted to pay Maria Theresa a 
subsidy of 300,000/. a year ' so long as the war should con- 
tinue, or the necessity of her affairs should require, ' but this 
the British Ministry refused to recognise, and it became the 
subject of fierce debate in Parliament. 

To meet this combination, Louis XV., on the advice of 
his minister but against his own better judgment, signed 
one of those one-sided and altruistic treaties which charac- 
terised French policy at this time, and renewed the family 
compact of 1733 by a treaty signed at Fontainebleau in Octo- 
ber, 1743. In this new edition the Bourbons of France and 
Spain pledged themselves to an indissoluble union. France 
was to declare war against Great Britain and Sardinia, to 
help Spain to reconquer Parma and the Milanese for Don 
Philip, and to compel Great Britain to give up her colony 
of Georgia. Finally, the two Powers were not to make peace 

191 



LORD CHATHAM 

until Gibraltar and, if possible, Minorca were restored to 
Spain. 1 

But the Austrian successes once more brought Frederick 
into the field to redress the balance, which now inclined too 
much to Austria, as it had inclined too much to France. 
Austria had acquired Bavaria for the moment, and perhaps 
would never evacuate it; she might be encouraged to at- 
tempt the reconquest of Silesia. Her armies were now in 
Alsace ; where would they stop ? The Queen, he knew, was 
only a degree less tenacious than himself. So he signed a 
new convention at Frankfort with the Emperor, the King 
of France, the King of Sweden as Landgrave of Hesse, and 
May, 1744 the Elector Palatine, and again took up arms against Austria, 
which was almost drained of troops. France at the same 
time formally declared war against Great Britain and Aus- 
tria, whom she had been fighting, so to speak, incognito, for 
three years past. On the other hand a quadruple alliance 
was concluded between Great Britain, Austria, Holland, and 
Saxony; based as usual on British subsidies, which Parlia- 
ment ungrudgingly voted, with the eloquent but surprising 
support of Pitt. 

Here begins the third period of the war. Louis XV. and 
Marshal Saxe at the head of 80,000 men entered the Austrian 
Netherlands almost without resistance. Frederick soon 
made himself master of Bohemia and Bavaria, and returned 
the Electorate to its sovereign, the Emperor Charles VII. 
In January 1745, worn out with misfortunes and anxieties 
and dignities, but once more in his capital, that hapless 
monarch died. Within three months his successor had con- 
cluded peace with Austria through the earnest pressure of 
the British Cabinet on the haughty Queen ; the Elector aban- 
doning his claims on the Austrian dominions, and promising 
his vote for the Empire to Maria Theresa's husband. Peace 

1 Martin, Hist, de France, xv. 265. Leadam, 376. 
192 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

between Austria and the King of Poland, Elector of Saxony, 
followed in May, when the contracting parties entered into 
a premature concert for the partition of the Prussian 
dominions. 

Otherwise 1745 was a disastrous year for Austria. The 
Allies, Austrians, British, and Dutch, under the Duke 
of Cumberland, sustained a bloody defeat at Fontenoy in 
May; and Great Britain, occupied with the domestic 
disturbance caused by the landing of Charles Edward, 
had to withdraw from active participation in the war. 
In August a secret convention was concluded at Hanover 
between the Kings of Prussia and Great Britain, by which 
the latter Power guaranteed Silesia to the former. This 
was the beginning of the end. The British Ministry now 
notified to the unyielding Queen that she must come to 
terms with her enemy, or expect no more assistance from 
England or Holland. The Austrian arms met everywhere 
with reverses. While the young Queen was planning with 
Saxony a triumphant march on Berlin, Frederick broke into 
Saxony and occupied Dresden. On this final blow Maria 
Theresa accepted the mediation of Great Britain and signed, 
on Christmas Day, 1745, the peace of Dresden which gave 
Silesia and Glatz to Frederick. So ends the third period 
of this strange and erratic war; a labyrinth of fugitive 
conventions and transient alliances, with two strong pur- 
poses in the centre. 

But the auxiliary combatants remained at war, just as 
the seconds in a duel have sometimes fought after their 
principals had settled their own differences. And so 
we now enter on its fourth period, that in which the British, 
Austrians, and Dutch (with the assistance of the Pied- 
montese in Italy) contended against France and Spain. 
The part of this war which chiefly concerns Great Britain 
was fought in Flanders. And in all these transactions it 

x 93 



LORD CHATHAM 

must be noted that a main difficulty of the British ministry, 
both from the practical and from the parliamentary point of 
view, lay in the problem of moving the Dutch. The 
Hollanders had everything to apprehend from the triumph 
of the French arms, but their phlegmatic temper, and 
still more the impracticable nature of their constitution, 
offered great obstacles to their co-operation. Anglers 
may see an analogy between these British negotiations with 
the Dutch and the tardy and tantalising sport of sniggling 
for eels. At the beginning of 1746, matters seemed to 
have come to a climax. The French were harrying 
Flanders, and were threatening to invade Holland. The 
Dutch Government were now stirred into proposing active 
measures, and the raising of a large army, to be under the 
command of the Prince of Waldeck; but they declined to 
declare war against France. The British agreed to a joint 
force of 100,000 men, comprising 40,000 to be furnished 
by the States-General, 30,000 by Austria, some Hanoverians 
and Saxons to be paid by England and Holland, and 
6000 Hessians to be provided by England after Charles 
Edward had been finally defeated. The Dutch regarded the 
British offers as inadequate, for it is a cardinal principle of 
all continental wars in which Great Britain is concerned that 
her purse is to be open to her allies, and that she is to find 
the funds. 

The Dutch we know are good allies, 
So are they all with subsidies. 1 

They were, moreover, not indisposed to negotiate with 
the French. These, meanwhile, under the leadership of 
Marshal Saxe, were occupying the Low Countries almost 
without interruption or resistance. In February they 
entered Brussels; in May, Antwerp. Mons, Charleroi, and 

1 Sir C. H. Williams, i. 247. 
194 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

Namur successively fell into their hands, and they ended 
the campaign by defeating the allies at Roucoux, and 
remaining practically in possession of the Austrian Nether- 
lands. But there was a glimpse of peace, in that some 
negotiations, abortive though they were destined to be, were 
opened at Breda. 

In 1747 the Duke of Cumberland again assumed the 
command with the usual disastrous result. The Dutch 
contingent, also as usual, was very inadequate: commercial 
nations are perhaps apt to treat international engage- 
ments in too commercial a spirit. But the irruption into 
Dutch Flanders of twenty thousand Frenchmen roused a 
spirit of a different kind. The Dutch rose like one man, 
overturned their rulers, and once more entrusted the 
Stadtholderate to the House of Orange. This was a 
national gain. But the luckless Cumberland again sus- 
tained a bloody defeat at Lauffeld. The battle, however, 
had one indirect but happy consequence. Our best General, 
Ligonier, was captured, and, being of French birth, was 
favourably received by Louis XV., who threw out hints 
of peace and placed him in communication with Marshal 
Saxe. The Marshal admitted that the war, and he him- 
self as concerned in it, were profoundly unpopular in France, 
that peace might be obtained on easy terms, and suggested 
that Cumberland and he should be the negotiators. 

Pelham was naturally eager for a pacification, George II. 
less so, and what the King wished Newcastle was anxious to 
wish. But a congress to adjust a treaty met at Aix-la- 
Chapelle in March 1748, and in April the preliminaries of 
a treaty were signed by the British and French and Dutch 
plenipotentiaries . 

Maria Theresa held aloof. To her it seemed that the 
first and only duty of the British, and, indeed, of all other 
nations, was to fight and work and pay that she might 

i95 



LORD CHATHAM 

regain Silesia, just as her father had held that the first, last, 
and only duty of Europe was to establish him in Spain. 
This peace would ratify the acquisition of Silesia by Fred- 
erick, and though she herself had ceded it, she could not 
bring herself to declare the cession definite. England, 
however, could no longer agree to the general interest being 
overridden by the obstinacy of the Empress-Queen; there 
had been bloodshed and suffering enough on her account. 
However just a cause may be, there are limits to human 
endurance, more especially when the cause to be upheld 
has no substantial importance for the defending nation. 
i 74 8 The definitive treaty was signed on October 18. Two 
days later, Spain, the original belligerent, acceded to it. 
There were, a philosopher may note, no stipulations regard- 
ing the commercial regulations which had been the original 
cause of our war with Spain. On the 23rd it was accepted 
by the Austrian Government. 

This is a narrative, as condensed as possible, of the 
foreign affairs which entered into our parliamentary debates. 
That part of the war which took place in Italy has been ex- 
cluded. It was a mere contest of petty rapine in which 
strange princes parcelled out Italy; which can scarcely be 
said to have concerned Great Britain, and Pitt not at all. 
Nor has it left the least visible trace in history. 

The greater war which we have summarised is a sufficient 
tangle. Leslie Stephen calls it 'that complicated series of 
wars which lasted some ten years, and passes all power of 
the ordinary human intellect to understand or remember. 
For what particular reason Englishmen were fighting at 
Dettingen, or Fontenoy, or Lauffeld is a question which a 
man can only answer when he has been specially crammed 
for examination, and his knowledge has not begun to ooze 
out.' 1 This is the exact truth, as the ill-fated chronicler 

1 L. Stephen, English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century, 138. 

196 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

who gropes about among the treaties and conventions is 
fain to confess. But apart from its complications this war is 
not in itself very memorable or exalted, though it has left 
an indelible result in the great Prussian monarchy. It was 
not beautiful or glorious. The guarantors of Austria at the 
first sign of her weakness had hurried, most of them, to 
divide her spoils, at the same time betraying each other from 
time to time without scruple, as their immediate interests 
required. Frederick had a business-like candour which 
almost disarms criticism. Macaulay in a famous passage 
has pointed out that innocent peasants perished in thou- 
sands all over the world that he might obtain and retain an 
Austrian province. And Maria Theresa, with all her 
maternal charm, is not wholly admirable. It was natural 
that she should fight for her rights, and induce all she 
could to fight for her; natural, perhaps, that she should be 
content that all Europe should bleed so that she might 
retain her territory. But we cannot forget that she who 
was ready that myriads should perish, not of Austrians or 
Magyars alone, but of all the nations that she could enlist 
in her cause, to maintain the sanctity of her rights to 
Silesia, was later on an accomplice in the partition of 
Poland; a reluctant accomplice, it is fair to add, as she 
herself was awake to the inconsistency of her position. 

Among all these stately figures and famous slaughters 
we see the central fact of the period, the shameless and 
naked cynicism of the eighteenth century, which, turning 
its back for ever on the wars of faith and conviction, 
looked only to contests of prey. And so it continued 
till the great Revolution cleared the air, and, followed up 
by the poignant discipline of Napoleon, made way for 
the wars of nationality. 

14 



LORD CHATHAM 



CHAPTER X 

NO more of Pitt's speeches are recorded during the 
session, which, with the enviable ease of those 
days, having opened on November 16, 1742, closed on 
April 21, 1743. In the interval before the ensuing session 
an event occurred, not in itself memorable, but notable 
for the contest that followed. In July, 1743, occurred the 
long-expected death of Wilmington, the nominal head of 
the Government. In itself this departure would not have 
caused a ripple on the surface of politics, but it opened a 
critical succession. Pulteney, now Earl of Bath, at once 
laid claim to it ; and his pretensions were warmly supported 
by Carteret, who was the minister in attendance on the 
King in Germany. Henry Pelham, supported by his 
brother Newcastle, also applied for the vacant post. As 
between these two groups it seemed certain that Bath, 
through Carteret, who was on the ground, would have 
the preference. Pelham, indeed, at the instance of Walpole, 
had, before the King left England, applied to his Majesty 
for the reversion of the moribund minister's place, and 
had, if Coxe may be trusted, received a definite promise. 
It seems difficult to credit this, for George was a man of 
his word, yet the Pelham brothers were unfeignedly as- 
tonished when the reversion was given them; so that had 
Pelham indeed received such a pledge, he must have 
expected that the King would break it. Six weeks of 
dire suspense followed the death of Wilmington ; an interval 
which was probably caused by the anxiety of the Sovereign 

198 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

to consult Walpole, while he intimated to Pelham that 
his decision would be conveyed to the ministry by Carteret. 
This seemed a deathblow to the chances of Pelham, though 
the King's aversion to Bath was notorious. But a letter 
at length arrived from Carteret, in which he announced, 
with unaffected regret but with a generous promise of 
support, that the prize had fallen to Pelham. The brothers 
were elated, if such an expression can ever be applied to 
the timid and cautious Pelham. Newcastle was trans- 
ported by the ' agreeable but most surprising news ' ; so 
much so, as to acknowledge that Carteret's letter was 
' manly. ' 

Walpole, in writing his congratulations, looked warily to 
the future. ■ Recruits,' he advised, should now be sought 
' from the Cobham squadron. . . . Pitt is thought able and 
formidable, try him or show him. ... Whig it with all 
opponents that will parley, but 'ware Tory.' Newcastle, 
on reading this letter to his brother, wrote back : ' I am 
afraid, one part of it, viz., the taking in of the Cobham party 
and the Whigs in opposition, without a mixture of Tories, is 
absolutely impracticable; and, therefore, the only question 
is whether, in order to get the Cobham party, etc., you will 
bring in three or four Tories, at least, with them, for, without 
that, they will not come, and this is what I have the greatest 
difficulty to bring myself to.' Orford's advice was not 
followed, and Pelham 's appointments were few and narrow. 
Two of Lord Bath's followers, a friend of the Prince of 
Wales, and a friend of his own, the only surviving name 
of the four, Henry Fox, were gratified, and that was all. 
And even this limited arrangement was not completed 
before Parliament met. 

The opening of the new session was anticipated with 
keen interest, as the ministry was known to be rent with 
divisions, and hatred of the Hanoverians had immeasurably 

199 



Dec. 1, 1743 



LORD CHATHAM 

swollen in consequence of rumours of the favour that the 
King had shown to his electoral subjects. He had been 
surrounded by Hanoverian Guards to the exclusion of the 
English Guards; he had worn at Dettingen a yellow sash, 
which it appears was a Hanoverian symbol of authority; 
the Hanoverians had refused to obey the orders of Lord 
Stair, and so forth. We can easily imagine the buzz of 
angry legend and comment; for national antipathies have 
no difficulty in obtaining substantial affidavits in their sup- 
port. Of this wild but not unreasonable intemperance Pitt, 
it is scarcely necessary to say, was the mouthpiece. In the 
debate on the Address he spoke with his accustomed vio- 
lence. He called Carteret ' an execrable or sole minister, who 
had renounced the British nation, and seemed to have drunk 
of the potion described in poetic fictions which made men 
forget their country.' * So far as this tirade concerned Car- 
teret's authority, nothing could be more absurd or wide of 
the truth. He could indeed scarcely have chosen a more 
unfortunate epithet than 'sole.' So far from being a sole 
minister, Carteret, as we have seen, had just received a 
crushing defeat in the elevation of Henry Pelham to the 
first place in the ministry, and the rejection of his own 
candidate; though he had strained all his influence in the 
cause. 

Nor had this ' sole minister ' any parliamentary following ; 
his only strength lay with the King, where it had just been 
found signally inadequate. The supreme minister in the last 
resort, and behind the scenes, was, in truth, Walpole. It 
was his decision and his alone that had turned the scale 
against Carteret and Pulteney. Carteret was congenial to 
the King, for he worked with his Sovereign in matters of 
foreign policy ; and, as we have seen, he could talk politics 
to the Sovereign in the King's own language. But, while 

1 Pari. Hist. xiii. 136. 
200 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS - 

the King tried to carry out his own views in Continental 
affairs, in domestic politics he looked to Walpole alone. 
Still, invective must necessarily have an object, and, by 
aiming at the King's confidential Foreign Minister, Pitt was 
able to wound the King as well. It is hinted by Yorke, the 
parliamentary chronicler, that Pitt's acrimony was dictated 
by jealousy of Carteret's influence with the Prince of Wales. 1 
As to this there is no proof, and conjecture is idle. Car- 
teret and Frederick had indeed been long connected, but this 
would scarcely impel one of the Prince's court to attack one 
of the Prince's friends. Moreover, were this the motive, 
Pitt's attacks would have been of a different and milder 
character, enough to damage Carteret, but not enough to 
embroil Pitt with the Prince, who was not merely his master, 
but the head of his political connection. It is clear that 
Pitt's sole object was to destroy Carteret as minister, not 
for the ignominious purpose of subverting him in a court 
camarilla, but to show his own power by demolishing the 
conspicuous man, the vizier of the King who proscribed 
himself. The mere fact that Carteret represented the King's 
Continental policy, and that Pitt had apparently deter- 
mined, in the jargon of that day, to storm the Closet, seems 
sufficient reason for Pitt's bitterness. He denounced 
Carteret as he denounced Hanover, as darling accessories 
of a monarch whom he was determined to harass in every 
way until his attacks should produce compliance or sur- 
render. But it was the fate of Pitt to have to recant his 
abuse of Carteret, as solemnly and as publicly as he recanted 
his abuse of Walpole. 'His abilities,' said Pitt in 1770 of 
Carteret, ' did honour to this House and to this nation. In 
the upper departments of Government he had not his equal. 
And I feel a pride in declaring that to his patronage, to his 

1 Pari. Hist. xiii. 473 (note). Cf. Phillimore, 226. But Carteret had 
taken the lead of the Prince's party in the House of Lords so far back as 1737. 

201 



LORD CHATHAM 

friendship, and instruction, I owe whatever I am. ' * It was 
a generous, almost an extravagant statement. But it 
shows how little importance should be attached to the early- 
philippics of Pitt, as of other aspiring and brilliant young 
men. Invectives are one of the least subtle and most 
piquant forms of advertisement, but they do not facilitate 
the task of biographers. 

The Sovereign he attacked openly and unsparingly. It 
was proposed, in the Address to the Throne, to congratulate 
the King on his escape from the dangers of the battle of 
Dettingen. This Pitt deprecated. ' Suppose, Sir, ' he asked, 
- it should appear that His Majesty was exposed to few or no 
dangers abroad, but those to which he is daily liable at 
home, such as the overturning of his coach or the stumbling 
of his horse, would not the address proposed, instead of 
being a compliment, be an affront and insult to the Sov- 
ereign?' No affront or insult could at any rate be more 
stinging or more unfounded than his wanton insinuation. 
George II. had the courage of his race, and had displayed it 
at Dettingen. At first his runaway horse had almost car- 
ried him into the French lines, so he dismounted and fought 
on foot for the rest of the day; not leaving the field until he 
had created a number of knights banneret; the last British 
king to take the field, and the last bannerets to be so cre- 
ated. 2 

It was vile then to disparage the King's courage, but 
political life in those days had no scruple and little shame. 
The sneers at Hanover with which this speech was sprinkled 
were better founded and deserved. But a serious and 
reasonable argument, not yet obsolete, pervaded Pitt's 
violent rhetoric on this occasion. It was that though the 
balance of power concerned all states, it concerned our 
island state least and last of all. Moreover, he attacked our 

1 Pari. Hist. xvi. 1097. 2 Fortescue, Hist, of the Army, ii. 101. 

202 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

recent policy on other grounds. On our attitude to Aus- 
tria, then fighting for its integrity under Maria Theresa, 
he heaped scorn from another point of view. We had 
promised her abundant assistance when she was fighting 
Prussia alone ; when France intervened we shrank back and 
left her in the lurch. That, he declared, was not our only 
discredit. When Prussia attacked the Queen of Hungary, 
and Spain, Poland, and Bavaria laid claim to her father's 
succession, we should have known that the preservation of 
the whole was impossible, and advised her to yield the part 
claimed by Frederick. But the words from the Throne and 
the speeches of the courtiers had persuaded the Austrian 
Government that Great Britain was determined to support 
her. So great was the determination, that even Hanover 
added near one-third to her army at her own cost, the first 
extraordinary expense, it was believed, that Hanover had 
borne for her purposes since her fortunate conjunction with 
England! But then the French intervened. Hanover was 
in danger, and so we promptly retired. We gave some 
money, indeed, but that was because our ministers contrived 
to make a job of every parliamentary grant. The Queen 
seeing that she was deserted, came to terms with Frederick, 
but much worse terms than he had originally offered. Then 
was the time for us to have insisted on her making peace 
with France and the phantom Emperor. But we had ad- 
vised her against this, for no conceivable reason except 
apparently that we wished to go on paying the 16,000 Hano- 
verians whom we were employing. As regards the battle of 
Dettingen, he declared that we had no idea of fighting, but 
that the French had caught us in a trap. The ardour of our 
troops was restrained by the cowardice of the Hanoverians ; 
we ran away in the night, leaving our dead and wounded 
behind us. Never would he consent to call the battle a 
victory, it was only a fortunate escape. 

203 



LORD CHATHAM 

Were we to continue fighting ? he asked. We ourselves 
had nothing to gain by it, though Hanover, no doubt, would 
continue to receive four or five hundred thousand pounds 
a year from us if we did. But we should consider, even 
the Hanoverians should consider, that we could not carry 
on a long war as in the reign of Queen Anne. We were 
not far from a national bankruptcy, and should soon have 
to disband our army. What, then, if the Pretender should 
land at the head of a French force? 

This outline is given to show the singular but forcible 
mixture of shrewd argument, wayward extravagance, and 
bitter scoffs, which at this time constituted Pitt's parlia- 
mentary armament. 

He followed this speech up by another on December 6, 
of which little remains; but his vehemence brought him 
into collision with the Speaker. He urged contemptu- 
ously that if we must have German troops we should 
rather hire those of Cologne and Saxony than those of 
Hanover. The King was surrounded by German officers, 
and by one English Minister without an English heart. 
The little finger of one man, he declared, had lain heavier 
upon the nation than an administration which had con- 
tinued twenty years. Murray, however, the Solicitor- 
General, afterwards Lord Mansfield, delivered a consum- 
mate speech against the motion, which carried so much 
conviction that Pitt with some of the other Cobham- 
ites struck out the words relating to the exhausted 
and impoverished state of the kingdom. But the 
amended motion was rejected by a majority of seventy- 
seven. 

And now there occurred a significant fissure in the 
Opposition. Pitt and Lyttelton were inclined to support 
the maintenance of the British force in Flanders. But 
Cobham, the chief of the little party, was uncompromising: 

204 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

he resigned his commission ' as captain of the troop of horse 
grenadiers ' and his seat in the Cabinet. A formula had 
to be framed to unite the two sections, and so George 
Grenville brought forward a motion praying his Majesty 
'in consideration of the exhausted and impoverished state 
of the Kingdom not to proceed in this war without the 
concurrence of the Dutch.' Pitt concurred in this motion, 
and promised that if it were rejected he would join in op- 
posing the continued employment of the British as well as 
the Hanoverian troops in Flanders. 

This revision by a little group is not without significance ; 
as the Opposition, we are told, at the beginning of the 
session, entrusted the direction of the party to a commit- 
tee of six, consisting of Dodington, Pitt, Sir John Cotton, 
Sir Watkin Wynn, Waller, and Lyttelton. The putting 
of political leadership into commission has never been 
successful in Parliament, and the device seems finally to 
have broken down when it was last attempted, by the Pro- 
tectionist party, after the fall of Peel. Nor does it appear 
to have been more happy on this occasion. Pitt and Lyt- 
telton, who, in spite of their engagement, still desired to 
support the continued employment of the British troops in 
the Low Countries, at a general meeting of the Opposition 
found themselves alone, and so agreed to give a silent vote 
with their associates. 

It is probable that this incident produced alienation as 
it certainly wrought friction between Pitt and Cobham. In 
the ensuing year we find Cobham describing Pitt as a young 
man of fine parts, but narrow, ignorant of the world, and 
dogmatical. 1 Two years afterwards Cobham went further, 
and described him as a wrong-headed fellow, whom he had 
had no regard for. 2 So we may well conjecture that from 
this time there was but little confidence between Pitt and 

1 Marchmont Papers, i. 80. 2 lb. i. 176. 

205 



LORD CHATHAM 

the patron of the cousinhood; a great emancipation, though 
not wholly a gain for Pitt, 
jan. 19,1744 On the vote of 393,733^. to maintain the 16,000 Hano- 
verians during the coming year, there was no need for the 
restraint of silence, so Pitt railed with his customary bit- 
terness against Carteret, who was the Hanover-troop min- 
ister, a flagitious taskmaster, with a party only composed 
of the 16,000 Hanoverians; and he ended his denunciation 
by wishing that Carteret were in the House, for then he 
would say ten times more. His speech was passionate and 
rhetorical, incomparably good of its kind. But the Gov- 
ernment prevailed in the division by 271 to 226. This 
majority of forty -five was larger than had been anticipated, 
and was due to the incessant exertions of Walpole. He 
sustained the nagging spirits of the ministry, who were on 
the point of abandoning the proposal. Newcastle, indeed, 
had blenched before the storm, and openly took part against 
the Hanoverians. But Walpole restored the fortune of the 
field. He stemmed the gathering retreat, put heart into 
the waverers, and used his personal credit with his old 
friends. Never in his own administration had he laboured 
any point with more zeal. 'The whole world,' writes his 
son Horace, 'nay, the Prince himself, allows that if Lord 
Orford had not come to town, the Hanover troops had 
been lost. They were, in effect, given up by all but Car- 
teret.' 1 

So far as the House of Commons was concerned, this 
ended the hostilities against the Hanoverian troops, though 
the House of Lords continued the controversy with a debate 
in which Chesterfield, who outdid Pitt in violence, delivered 
a speech which was greatly admired. But a subsidy of 
2 00, 000 1, had to be voted to the King of Sardinia under the 
treaty of Worms. This treaty, negotiated by the King and 

1 To Mann, Jan. 24, 1744. Cf. Pari. Hist. xiii. 467 note. 

206 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

Carteret in Germany independently of the Home Govern- 
ment, was little relished by that Government, and offered a 
tempting target to the warriors of the Opposition. On aJ an - 1744 
first motion for papers, Pitt was again prominent, though 
little of his speech survives. Alluding, however, to a secret 
convention attached to the treaty, which Carteret had signed 
but which ministers had refused to ratify, he declared, ' I 
only wanted the sight of a convention, tacked to the treaty 
which that audacious hand had signed, to furnish matter for 
immediate impeachment.' On the actual vote the Govern- 
ment had only a majority of 62. Subsequent unreported 
debates furnished Pitt with opportunities of denouncing the 
Pelham brethren as subservient tools of Carteret. But the 
Government waxed stronger in proportion to the heat of 
opposition. On a vote of censure they had a majority of 
114. Through these discussions Pitt passes like a phantom, 
foremost by all consent in debate, but without leaving any 
footprint of speech behind. 

From these broils Parliament was now distracted by 
startling intelligence. By message to the House on Feb- 
ruary 15 (1744) the King apprised his faithful lieges that a 
French fleet was prowling in the Channel, and that the 
young Stuart Prince, Charles Edward, had arrived in France 
to join it. One of our vessels had met this squadron of 
seventeen men-of-war and four frigates so long ago as Janu- 
ary 27, 'half seas over' between Brest and the Land's End, 
prowling apparently northwards. There was something of 
a panic: men remembered how the Dutch in 1667 had sailed 
up the Thames, and apprehended a repetition of that disgrace. 
The Jacobites began to raise their head, but stocks did not 
fall. The King's message announced that the 'eldest son 
of the Pretender to his Crown is arrived in France; and that 
preparations are making there to invade this kingdom in 
concert with disaffected persons here. ' A loyal address was 

207 



LORD CHATHAM 

at once prepared, to which the Opposition moved an addi- 
tion, promising an inquiry into the state of the Navy. The 
amendment was, of course, supported by Pitt, and, of course, 
defeated. But Pitt, as stout an anti- Jacobite as his grand- 
father, promised his adhesion to the address whether the 
amendment voted or not ; and a few days later, on the pres- 
entation of papers, he supported the Government so warmly 
as to receive the public thanks of Pelham. But for once the 
interest was not in the Commons but the Lords. Newcastle 
had laid the papers before the House, and with his usual 
blundering ineptitude had allowed the House to pass to 
private business. Then Orford rose, and broke his long 
silence. With dignity and emotion he confessed that he 
had vowed to refrain from speech in that House, but that 
abstinence now would be a crime. He had heard the King's 
message, and had observed with amazement that that House 
was to be so wanting in respect as to leave it unanswered. 
Was our language so barren as to be unable to find words to 
the King at such a crisis ; ' a time of distraction and confu- 
sion, a time when the greatest power in Europe is setting up 
a Pretender to his throne ? ' 

' I have indeed particular reason to express my astonish- 
ment and my uneasiness on this occasion; I feel my breast 
fired with the warmest gratitude to a gracious and royal 
master whom I have so long served; my heart overflows 
with zeal for his honour, and ardour for the lasting security 
of his illustrious house. But, my lords, the danger is com- 
mon, and an invasion equally involves all our happiness, all 
our hopes, and all our fortunes.' 

In these passionate words the wary and unemotional 
Orford allowed his apprehension to overflow. He saw the 
work of his life, the keeping out of the Stuarts, compro- 
mised and endangered by the unpopularity of the throne, 
and the blunders of jobbing mediocrity. He perceived the 

208 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

danger which he had so long warded off now instant and 
imminent. The House was deeply moved. Newcastle 
with obvious mortification acknowledged his lapse, and the 
Chancellor hurriedly drafted an address. Even the Prince 
of Wales, whose hatred of Walpole was perhaps the deepest 
feeling of which his shallow nature was capable, was so 
stirred, that he rose and shook hands with the veteran min- 
ister. Nay, as we are told by a chronicler blissfully un- 
conscious of bathos, ' he revoked the prohibition which pre- 
vented the family of Lord Orford from attending his levee.' 
It was a dramatic occasion, worthy of being the last public 
appearance of Orford. The hard-bitten old statesman who 
had been baited for near a quarter of a century, and had 
always given his opponents as good as he had got, disappeared 
from the stage with a burst of passionate patriotism. 

The end is so near that we may follow him thither. This 
speech was on the last day of February, and he was soon 1744 
afterwards seized with a painful and mortal complaint; 
but in July he could not resist returning to Houghton for a 
final visit. There he remained till November, beset by 
anxious solicitations both from the King and from the min- 
istry, for he was the guide and stay of both. At last, though 
tortured with the stone, he consented to return to London 
at the urgent solicitation of his sovereign, then engaged in a 
desperate struggle to retain Carteret as Secretary of State. 
Even Carteret, his old enemy, in the stress of self-preserva- 
tion sought his aid. Orford set out on November 19, and 
in four slow days of an agony which wrung even the prac- 
tised nerves of. Ranby, the surgeon (and it is difficult even 
now to read Ranby 's narrative without emotion), he reached 
London. The crisis then was over, for he had put an end to 
it on his journey. A message despatched by the Pelhams 
had met him on the road and placed him in possession of the 
facts of the situation. He had at once written to advise the 

209 



LORD CHATHAM 

King to part with Carteret, and the King had instantly 
submitted. 

This was Walpole's last act of power, but he remained 
in London to die. For four months he lingered under the 
hands of the surgeons, sometimes under opium, sometimes 
suffering tortures with equanimity and good humour. But 
even so his shrewd and cynical common sense did not desert 
him. Consulted by the Duke of Cumberland as to a mar- 
riage projected for him by the King, but repugnant to the 
Duke, the dying statesman advised him to consent to the 
marriage on condition of an ample and immediate estab- 
lishment. 'Believe me,' he added, 'the marriage will not 
be pressed. ' Walpole's knowledge of mankind left him only 
with his death. 

His constancy, his courage, his temper, his unfailing 
resource, his love of peace, his gifts of management and 
debate, his long reign of prosperity will always maintain 
Walpole in the highest rank of English statesmen. Dis- 
tinguished even in death, he rests under the bare and rustic 
pavement of Houghton Church, in face of the palace that 
he had reared and cherished, without so much as an initial 
to mark his grave. This is the blank end of so much hon- 
our, adulation, power, and renown. For a century and a 
half unconscious hobnails and pattens have ground the 
nameless stones above him, while mediocrities in marble 
have thronged our public haunts. His monument, unvoted, 
unsubscribed, but supreme, was the void left by his death, 
the helpless bewilderment of King and Government, the 
unwilling homage and retractation offered by his foes, the 
twenty years of peace and plenty represented by his name. 

And here another illustrious name cannot but suggest 
itself, though it may seem difficult to bring into anything 
like a parallel the two great Sir Roberts, Walpole and Peel. 
Both were distinguished by the same cautious and pacific 

2IO 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

sagacity. But they differed by the whole width of human 
nature in temperament. Walpole belonged to the school 
of the cold blood, and Peel to that of the warm. This, per- 
haps, constitutes the most important touchstone in the 
characters of statesmen, and success usually lies with the 
colder temperament. Of this principle, Fox, who was warm 
blooded, presents the most remarkable illustration, and 
Gladstone, who was not less so, the most signal exception. 
Peel's conscience, moreover, was as notably sensitive as 
Walpole 's was notoriously the reverse. But though thus es- 
sentially apart, there is one capital point on which the careers 
of Walpole and Pitt bear an almost exact resemblance to 
each other. Neither of them, strangely enough, reached his 
full height until his fall ; neither acquired the full confidence 
of the country until he had lost that of Parliament; after 
having exercised almost paramount power as ministers, 
neither ever reached his highest supremacy until he had left 
office for ever. Then, after a great catastrophe which had 
seemed to demolish them, it was perceived that they had 
soared above the mist into a higher air, clear of passion and 
interest ; whence, though with scarce a following and without 
the remotest idea of a return to office, they spoke with an 
authority which they had never possessed when their word 
was law to an obedient majority in the Commons; an au- 
thority derived from experience and wisdom, without any 
lingering suspicion of self-interest. They lived in reserve, 
and only broke their self-imposed silence when the highest 
interests of the country seemed to forbid them to maintain 
it. Walpole, it is true, had to do his work mainly behind 
the scenes, while Peel did it conspicuously in Parliament ; but 
the position was the same. If their eulogist had to choose 
the supreme period in the lives of both Walpole and Peel, he 
would select, not the epoch of their party triumphs, but the 
few exalted judicial years which elapsed between their final 

211 



LORD CHATHAM 

resignation and their death. It may seem a strain of lan- 
guage to use the word ' judicial, ' for Walpole remained the 
oracle and stay of Whiggery, while Peel extended his con- 
sistent protection to the weak ministry of Lord John Russell. 
But Peel's protection of Russell was given in defiance of 
party to secure the Free Trade which he deemed vital, and 
Walpole 's guidance of ^higgery was in disinterested support 
of men he disliked and despised because he deemed Whig- 
gery, or at least opposition to Jacobitism, not less vital. 
Free Trade and Whiggery were, in the opinion of the two 
statesmen, essential to avert the revolutions which the oppo- 
site systems would have involved. 

This seems a digression, but at this time Pitt and Wal- 
pole were not far apart; they secretly acknowledged each 
other's power and merit. Pitt had already begun to appre- 
ciate the solid sagacity of Walpole, and to repent of some 
random invective. Walpole saw the rhetorical boy de- 
veloping into the man of the future, and was more and more 
anxious to enlist him. 'Sir Robert Walpole,' said Pitt in 
Parliament at a later period, ' thought well of me, and died 
at peace with me. He was a truly English minister. ' * 

1 Orford, ii. 132. 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 



CHAPTER XI 

SOON after this memorable debate France formally de- March, i 744 
clared war against Great Britain in a document recit- 
ing the injuries sustained by France at the hands of the 
'King of England, Elector of Hanover,' and faction was for 
the moment laid on one side, though Pitt, while supporting 
the Government, managed to declare that perdition would 
attend Carteret as the ' rash author of those measures which 
have produced this disastrous, impracticable war.' Still 
Parliament adjourned with comparative harmony in May. 
Before it met again two events occurred of the greatest 
importance to Pitt. 

The first was the death of that vigorous old termagant 
Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough. All through life she had 
been more bellicose, though with less success, than her 
illustrious husband, and of late years had devoted her 
peculiar powers of hatred to Walpole. This bitterness ex- 
tended even beyond the grave, for by a codicil dated two 
months before her death she bequeathed legacies to the two 
men who had most distinguished themselves by their at- 
tacks on that minister. One was Chesterfield, to whom she 
left 20,000/.; the other was Pitt, to whom she left 10,000/., 
' for the noble defence he made for the support of the laws of 
England, and to prevent the ruin of his country.' More- 
over, she seems to have bequeathed to him her 'manor 
in the County of Buckingham, late the estate of Richard 
Hampden Esq: and leasehold in Suffolk; and lands etc. 
in Northampton.' 1 Pitt, in acknowledging the bequest 

1 Thomson's Life of the Duchess of Marlborough, ii. 571-2. 
15 213 



LORD CHATHAM 

to Marchmont, her executor, demurely and ambiguously 
replies : ' Give me leave to return your Lordship my thanks 
for the obliging manner in which you do me the honour 
to inform me of the Duchess of Marlborough's great good- 
ness to me. The sort of regard I feel for her memory 
I leave to your Lordship's heart to suggest to you.' 1 Nor 
was this legacy all, for she settled her Wimbledon estate on 
her favourite grandson John Spencer, and after him on his 
only son; should that only son die without issue, it was 
to be divided between Chesterfield and Pitt. She, more- 
over, induced John Spencer to make a will bequeathing his 
own Sunderland estates to Pitt after his own sickly son. 2 
Two years afterwards Spencer himself died at the age of 
thirty-seven ' because he would not be abridged of those in- 
valuable blessings of an English subject, brandy, small beer 
and tobacco,' 3 so that only a child stood between Pitt and 
this great inheritance. Fortunately the splendid contin- 
gency did not take effect. For Chesterfield died without 
legitimate issue, and the Pitts have long been extinct ; but 
the descendants of John Spencer's only son have been men 
of a purity of character and honour which have sweetened 
and exalted the traditions of English public life. 

The legacy was opportune in more respects than one. 
It came as a solace to Pitt, who was desperately ill at Bath 
with gout in his stomach, which the waters were unavail- 
ing to remove; his friends indeed feared that he would 
be disabled for life. It also made him independent. 
Bolingbroke indeed thought it made him too independent. 4 
Cynics soon declared it to be timely from another point 
of view, for immediately after the Duchess's death there 

1 Marchmont Papers, ii. 338. 

2 H. Walpole to Montagu, June 24, 1746. Cf. Grenville Papers, i. 131. 
Camelford MS. 

3 H. Walpole to Mann, June 20, 1746. 

4 Marchmont Papers, i. 70. 

214 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

was a crisis which was to put an end to Pitt's opposition 
and so to his claims on her sympathies. Carteret fell, and 
with his fall disappeared the object of Cobham's hatred and 
Pitt's philippics. The tempting contrast between Pitt re- 
ceiving a legacy as the leading member of the Opposition, 
and Pitt immediately reconciled to the ministry, and so 
ceasing to be a 'Patriot,' could not escape satire. Sir 
Charles Hanbury Williams lost no time in penning the coarse 
but vigorous lampoon which depicts the ghost of the old 
Duchess appearing to Pitt. 'Return, base villain, my 
retaining fee,' says the spectre, reminds the legatee that 
even Judas returned the wage of betrayal, and leaves him 
to the 'lash of lost integrity.' * But these taunts were wide 
of the mark. It was not Pitt's integrity that had dis- 
appeared, but the object of his opposition, now that Car- 
teret had fallen. 

The story of that fall is material to the life of Pitt; 
it is that second event of importance to him at this time 
to which we have alluded. We have seen that Walpole's 
last journey to London was caused by the King's struggle 
to retain Carteret whom the Pelhams insisted on removing. 
This indeed was a matter of necessity for them, as they 
could never enjoy real power while Carteret engrossed the 
King's confidence. Moreover, owing to the ill success of 
the Austro-British alliance during 1744 in operations with 
which he was identified he had become extremely unpopular. 
He himself was dissatisfied with his position, for though he 
had the ear of the King he was constantly outvoted in the 
Cabinet. 'Things cannot go on as they are,' he said to 
the ruling brother. ' I will not submit to be overruled and 
outvoted on every point by four to one. If you will under- 
take the Government, do so. If you cannot or will not I 
will.' This rash declaration of war sealed his fate. As a 

1 Works of Sir C. H. Williams, 1822, ii. 152. 
215 



LORD CHATHAM 

matter of fact the main division in the Cabinet of which 
we have record at this time was nine to four ; but the majority- 
was no doubt steady and inflexible against Carteret. The 
brothers now concentrated their energies on his overthrow. 
But before making any open attack on so strong a position, 
they wisely endeavoured to secure new sources of strength 
by negotiation with the Opposition. 

During the year 1744 the leaders of the Opposition had 
reunited, 'upon one principle,' says the malignant Glover, 
'which was to get into place.' This may fairly be said, 
without disparagement, to be the legitimate object of all 
Oppositions. In any case these politicians may well have 
realised that divided and scattered they were impotent, and 
they may have desired to make themselves felt in Parlia- 
ment with or without office. So they appointed a com- 
mittee of nine to treat with the Government. The junto, 
as it was termed in the jargon of that day, consisted of 
Bedford, Chesterfield, Gower, Cobham, Pitt, Lyttelton, 
Waller, Bubb, and Sir John Hinde Cotton. 1 This powerful 
body was approached by Carteret, always tardy and unskil- 
ful in such negotiations ; but he had been anticipated by the 
brethren in power, who, in such intrigues, displayed all 
the skill that he lacked. He obtained, however, the 
powerful mediation of the Prince of Wales, who had a 
regard for him. Carteret's offers were liberal enough. He 
offered that the administration should be transformed, and 
places found for all of them; but they replied that they 
could make no terms with him. He turned, as we have 
seen, to Walpole in his despair, but in vain. Every hole 
was stopped. The Pelhams had secured both Walpole and 
the Committee. 

Five of the junto, including Pitt and Lyttelton, were, 
it is said, in favour of joining the Pelhams without any 

1 Glover, 30. 
216 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

stipulation. The minority, including Cobham, who con- 
sidered that the pass had been sold, and who cursed the 
less scrupulous tactics of the majority, were for making 
conditions as regards future policy. However, all, both of 
the majority and the minority, were brought into the 
scheme; Cobham, who received a regiment, having, it 
is said, also obtained an assurance from Newcastle that 
the interests of Hanover should be subordinated to the 
interests of Great Britain. Bedford became First Lord 
of the Admiralty; Gower, Privy Seal; Waller, Cofferer; 
Lyttelton, a Lord of the Treasury; Bubb, Treasurer of 
the Navy; and Cotton, a notorious Jacobite, Treasurer 
of the Chambers. It should be added, however, that the 
narrative of this negotiation, however probable it may 
appear, rests on the doubtful authority of Glover, who is 
too venomous to be trustworthy. But in any case it is not 
necessary to condemn the Committee, even if Glover's 
statement be accepted as fact. Should so powerful a body 
of men enter the feeble Government of the Pelhams, they 
might well feel confident of controlling its policy with or 
without previous stipulation. A severer judgment may be 
passed when it is seen that the policy remained substantially 
unaltered, and that Pitt found himself able to discriminate 
between Carteret's policy with Carteret in office, and the 
same policy with Carteret out of office. 

Fortified by this treaty, which included, of course, 
places for Pitt and Chesterfield, to be given when the King 
could be induced to give them, the Pelhams executed their 
stroke of state; and having, as we have seen, made sure of 
the oracle at Houghton to which the King was sure to have 
recourse, they sent the Chancellor to the King to inform 
him of the determination of the entire Cabinet to resign 
unless he would remove Carteret. Still the King could not 
be brought to abandon his favourite Foreign Minister and 

217 



LORD CHATHAM 

his favourite foreign policy. It was not until Orford gave 
the decision against Carteret that the Sovereign succumbed, 
three weeks after the delivery by the Pelhams of their 
ultimatum. 

The fall of Carteret left the brothers, Newcastle and 
Pelham, absolute masters of the situation. The King had 
been completely defeated, and had sullenly to submit. He 
would scarcely speak to his Ministers. When he broke 
silence it would be to say, 'I have done all you asked me, 
I have put all the power into your hands, and I suppose 
you will make the most of it.' To that Hardwicke, the 
Lord Chancellor, with more than legal sublety replied, 
'The disposition of places is not enough if your Majesty 
takes pains to show the world that you disapprove of your 
own work.' This was more than the King could endure. 
'My work! ' he broke out; 'I was forced, I was threatened.' 
The Chancellor was shocked at these expressions. He 
knew of nothing of the kind. Such harshness was utterly 
alien to the ministerial mind. The mere idea of compulsion 
was shocking to it. 'No means were employed but what 
have been used in all times, the humble advice of your 
servants supported by such reasons as convinced them 
that the measure was necessary for your service.' This was 
the legal and fastidious method of describing the threatened 
strike of the ministry in the previous November. 

Carteret resigned in the last week of November (1744), 
and the Pelhams used their victory wisely and well by 
building up during the following month a strong adminis- 
tration on a large basis. It comprised men of all parties, 
Whigs, Tories, even Jacobites, forgotten Whigs, forgotten 
Tories, forgotten Jacobites, and was called in the canting 
phrase of that day the Broad Bottom Administration, as 
being a coalition of all parties. The only flaw in it was 
that it omitted the only men worth having. Among the 

218 



HLS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

new officials were George Grenville and George Lyttelton, 
who became subordinate Lords of the Treasury and Ad- 
miralty. 'Do what you will,' Cobham had said, 'provided 
you take care of my boys,' from whom Pitt now seemed 
to be excluded; for Cobham found him positive and un- 
bending, differing sometimes, it may be presumed, from 
Cobham. When complete, this ministry was so com- 
prehensive as to annihilate opposition, and render the 
next few years unprecedentedly placid and dull from the 
parliamentary point of view. 

Outside the forgotten worthies who were provided 
with places, there towered the two memorable men, Pitt 
and Chesterfield, the one great and the other considerable. 
Against them the King remained implacable. But he had 
at last to yield to the admission of Chesterfield. At first 
'he shall have nothing,' had said the King, 'trouble me 
no more with such nonsense.' But now Chesterfield was 
to combine the Lord Lieutenancy of Ireland with a special 
embassy to the Hague. On Pitt alone was the veto still 
absolute. And yet he was the only man whom the ministers 
really dreaded. 1 

The Pelhams, through Cobham, had promised him the 
Secretaryship at War, on which his heart was set; but 
they were unable to fulfil their pledge, and soothed him 
for the time with promises that they would persevere in 
pressing him upon the Sovereign. With these fine words 
Pitt professed himself satisfied, and promised support, all 
the more readily as he knew himself to be inevitable. In 
the meantime, however, he gave up the only post he held, 
a course to which he was impelled both by the Marlborough 
legacy and the fall of Carteret; for while the first made 

1 Marchmont Papers, i. 67, 172. It was said that Harrington, from an in- 
terest in Lady Yonge, wife of the actual incumbent of the office, did his best 
to prevent Pitt's becoming Secretary for War. lb. 97. But there was a more 
majestic obstacle. 

219 



LORD CHATHAM 

him independent of salary, the second had alienated the 
Prince of Wales. So in April (1745) he resigned his groom- 
ship of the bedchamber, and met Parliament in the un- 
adorned character of the most powerful private individual 
in the country. 

On the army estimates he spoke for the first time, and 
with vehemence, as a supporter of the Government. On 
this occasion, too, he first utilised the apparatus of gout 
with the demeanour of a graceful invalid, whose end was 
approaching. Were it to be the last day of his life, he 
exclaimed, he would spend it in the House of Commons, 
since he judged the condition of his country to be worse 
than that of his own health. Formerly these expressions 
would have meant that the Government was ruining the 
nation. But now, he explained, that though Carteret had 
nearly wrecked the kingdom, the present object was, by 
connecting Hanover with Holland, to arrive at a prompt 
and fair pacification. He paid warm compliments to 
Pelham on his patriotism and capacity for business, and 
commended his Government with oblique and friendly 
expressions directed towards the King. A dawn of salva- 
tion to this country had broken forth (which, apparently, 
had hitherto been obscured by the form of Carteret), 
and he would follow it as far as it would lead him. His 
'fulminating eloquence,' we are told, 'silenced all opposi- 
tion.' 2 

In February 1 745 a question arose of peculiar delicacy for 
Pitt. Through one of the compromises sometimes required 
by political emergency the question of the employment 
of the Hanoverians, against which Pitt was so strongly 
pledged, was arranged by transferring them to Maria 
Theresa, with an extra subsidy to enable her to pay them. 
This somewhat transparent artifice was boldly and dexter- 

2 Pari. Hist. xiii. 1054-6. 
220 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

ously defended by Pitt himself. On such occasions it is 
well not to hesitate or refine, and Pitt spoke without visible 
qualms. 'It was,' he said, 'a meritorious and popular 
measure, which did honour to the minister who advised 
it, and the Prince, who so graciously vouchsafed to follow it, 
and must give pleasure to every honest heart. As to what 
had been thrown out that the Queen of Hungary might 
take them into her pay, when they were dismissed from 
ours, what of that? She was at liberty to take them or 
not. They would not be forced on her, but God forbid 
that these unfortunate troops should by our votes be pro- 
scribed at every court in Europe.' It was enough that, 'by 
his Majesty's wisdom and goodness,' they were no longer 
voted annually as a part of our army, and so forth. 1 

It is obvious from the meagre report that Pitt was now 
as copious in his praise of the King as he had formerly 
been niggard. His Sovereign had become wise and good 
and gracious; the Hanoverian troops, which had been so 
short a time ago cowardly and contemptible troops, were 
now unfortunate and meritorious, well worthy the attention 
and employment of Maria Theresa. One or two members 
could not help smiling; they called the measure collusive, 
and declared that if we were to pay the Hanoverians at all 
it were better to pay them directly, when they would at 
least be under our direction and control, than through the 
Queen of Hungary, when they would not. It is not on 
record that any one asked what advantage would be reaped 
by the taxpayer under the method proposed, when he would 
pay at least as much as before, but without the least check 
as to the way in which the money was spent. Nevertheless, 
there were complaints enough. Pitt must have hinted that 
it was better that they should fight under the Hungarian 
flag than the British, as they did not fight in harmony by the 

1 Pari. Hist. xiii. 1176. 
221 



LORD CHATHAM 

side of British troops; for this called up a Northumbrian 
baronet to explain that this was contrary to the fact, and 
that he should raise the point in a motion. Pitt at once rose 
again, not in his high line, but ' with all the art and temper 
imaginable,' soothed and complimented the honest member, 
hinted that his motion would only serve the purposes of 
Carteret, whom they both rejoiced to see removed, and 
generally allayed the debate with complete success. 1 

This is again a notable mark in his career. For the first 
time he appears, not as the fierce hero of declamation and 
invective, but as the dexterous official diplomatist, coaxing 
and reassuring. He was fast moving onwards. 

The official character of Pitt's speeches is all the more 
marked because there was little to commend and much to 
attack in the conduct of the ministry, which had, to say 
the least, been singularly unfortunate. The disastrous 
battle of Fontenoy was not redeemed by the capture of 
Louisbourg, a gallant affair for which local volunteers and 
local enterprise, rather than the Government, deserve the 
credit. And now during the Parliamentary recess from 
May to October there suddenly appeared a fresh danger, 
the one against which Walpole's policy had been mainly 
directed for a generation. On August 19, Charles Edward, 
eldest son of the exiled Prince of Wales, and grandson of 
King James II., raised the standard of civil war at Glen- 
finnan ; on September 1 7 he was living in the palace of his 
ancestors at Holyrood ; four days afterwards he completely 
defeated the forces sent against him. Had he at once 
marched South he might well have reached London, and 
had he reached London the face of history in this island 
might have been changed. The Cabinet was panic-stricken, 
not merely at the advance of Charles, but at the anger 
of their legal Sovereign, who seemed likely to recall Car- 

1 Pari. Hist. xiii. 1177. 
222 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

teret to his side. Dutch troops were hastily fetched over 
and sent to the North, and English troops from Flanders 
followed. Had these reinforcements been detained by 
contrary winds but a few weeks Pelham declared that 
London could not have been defended against the Jacobites. 
Two days before the victory of Charles Edward, Henry 
Fox wrote that 'had five thousand (French) troops landed 
in any part of this island a week ago, I verily believe the 
entire conquest would not have cost them a battle.' 

But Charles contented himself with a reign at Holyrood 
of six weeks, and this delay lost him his chances of success. 
When Parliament met on October 17 he was still in Edin- 
burgh, but adequate measures had been taken to render 
his enterprise abortive. All this does not concern Pitt, 
except as giving him an opportunity of expressing his 
devoted loyalty to George II. ; but while Charles Edward 
was marching on Derby a desperate struggle was going on 
which related entirely to him. In the new session he had 
begun to show signs of irritation and of impatience with 
the Government; the emollients of the Pelhams began to 
lose their virtue, and he was determined not to be fooled 
any longer. His amiability had disappeared, and though his 
speeches are unreported, it is evident that the Ministers were 
now made to feel the terrors of his tongue. 'Yesterday,' 
writes Horace Walpole, 'they had another baiting from 
Pitt, who is ravenous for the place of Secretary at War: 
they would give it him : but as preliminary, he insists on a 
declaration of our having nothing to do with the Continent,' 
a stipulation which reads strangely enough by the light of 
the years to come. The Pelhams saw that they could no 
longer defer the fulfilment of their promises, and that it 
was necessary to approach the King. The moment was 
singularly unfavourable. The King had never forgiven the 
compulsion put on him to dismiss Carteret, nor the fact of his 

223 



LORD CHATHAM 

separation from Carteret. He had shrewdness enough to 
see that in ability and grasp of affairs Carteret towered 
above the other ministers except the Chancellor; and he 
despised Newcastle, who was principally thrown into con- 
tact with him. It was a shame, he declared, that a man who 
was not fit to be a chamberlain at the pettiest of German 
courts should be forced on the nation and on the Crown as a 
principal minister. All through 1745 the royal resentment, 
smouldered, though it was kept in suspense by the rebellion. 
But when that movement lost in importance and became 
clearly doomed, the King felt more free to display his 
feelings. Foreign policy, with which we are not here con- 
cerned, was part of his grievance; but the main cause of 
irritation was the threatened intrusion of Pitt on his 
councils. And yet this was obviously impending and even 
inevitable. Pitt, at first so patient, had begun to show 
his teeth in public, and probably in private as well. The 
crisis could not be any longer avoided. 

In the preceding autumn there had been conferences 
between the Pelhams on the one side and Pitt and Cobham 
on the other. On November 20, 1745, Newcastle records a 
meeting at which Pitt put forward his demands, and 
'apprehended great difficulties in bringing about what we 
so much desired,' his accession to office. His conditions 
were finally melted down to an extension of the Place Bill 
so as to exclude from Parliament all officers in the Army 
under the rank of lieutenant-colonel, and in the Navy below 
the rank of captain; the removal of all the remaining 
adherents of Carteret, notably the two Finches, from Court ; 
and a 'total alteration of the foreign system, by feeding 
only the war on the Continent, acting there as auxiliaries, 
and particularly by confining all the assistance we should 
give to the Dutch to the bare contingent of 10,000 men; 
but to increase our navy, and to act as principals at sea 

224 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

in the war against France and Spain. For a peace with 
France, at present, was not to be thought of.' 

The first condition presented no complications. The 
second seemed inexpedient on grounds of prudence and 
decency. The third presented more difficulty. Newcastle 
had two long conferences upon it, first with Pitt and then 
with Cobham. Finally a meeting was held between the 
Chancellor, Hardwicke, Harrington, Pelham, and Newcastle 
on one side, and Gower, Bedford, Cobham, and Pitt on 
the other. 1 

The situation of affairs at this moment was this : Charles 
Edward was marching from Holyrood towards London. 
The French had won Fontenoy and were overrunning the 
Austrian Netherlands, without difficulty and almost without 
resistance. Maria Theresa was about to conclude peace 
at Dresden (December 25, 1745) by a renewed cession of 
Silesia. This was the juncture at which the Pelhams 
resolved to force on a Cabinet crisis in order to obtain the 
services of Pitt. The fact at least displays the value and 
importance of the personage who was the subject of contest. 

The real point at issue between the Government and Pitt 
was this: The Government wished to give general and 
urilimited assurances of assistance, amounting almost to a 
guarantee, to the Dutch. Pitt wished the assistance 
definitely limited to a force of 10,000 men; and that we 
should then, free of all other continental complications (for 
b>oth parties agreed that Austria must come to terms with 
Prussia), carry on a purely naval war against France and 
Spain. 

At this conference between the ministers and the 
Cobham plenipotentiaries, Newcastle was the spokesman of 

1 Bedford is ranked by Newcastle among the Cobham deputation, though 
he was First Lord of the Admiralty at the time. Perhaps he was the honest 
broker. 

225 



LORD CHATHAM 

the Government. He declared that the Queen of Hungary 
had forfeited her rights to any further assistance, and that 
we were about to tell her that she could have no more 
from us. On this point all were apparently agreed, so that 
Austria was eliminated from the discussion. The case of 
Holland was, however, in the opinion of ministers, different ; 
her existence was necessary to us, and we must proffer help 
to her, if only to prevent her concluding a separate peace 
with France. But an offer limited to 10,000 men would 
not prevent such a peace; we must show a general dis- 
position to assist. Lord Cobham answered that this sort 
of defensive war could never bring about a peace, that the 
Dutch would evade their engagements, and we should find 
ourselves with as formidable a continental war on our 
hands as if we were again actively supporting Maria Theresa. 
Pitt warmly supported Cobham; spoke strongly against 
the Dutch; 'insisted that 10,000 men in our present cir- 
cumstances was a generous and noble succour He 

insisted on the necessity of coming to some precision as to 
the contingent in order to satisfy the people; and talk'd 
much of the great impression we could make upon France, 
when our efforts were singly at sea.' 

At this point Bedford and Gower separated themselves 
from Cobham and Pitt. It was not possible, they said, to 
increase our navy. In fine, the plenipotentiaries of the 
Government pointed out that if France and Holland came 
to terms, we might have France and Spain free to devote 
their whole energies against us, and, as the others chimed 
in, 'they might easily keep the rebellion on foot for years, 
if not destroy us quite.' 

Cobham and Pitt, however, departed unshaken, though 
with great civility and good-humour. Newcastle glumly 
sums up the position. The King may say that he was 
ready to take these gentlemen into the Government, but, as 

226 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

they will not come in, ask if the Ministry will thereupon 
desert him ? ' To which, to be sure, no other answer can be 
given but that we are not in a condition to carry it on. To 
depend upon my Lord Granville's friends to support this 
administration against Lord Granville is a contradiction in 
itself. To bring in Mr. Pitt against his own will is impos- 
sible. And, therefore, at present there seems to be nothing 
to be done, if Mr. Pitt is determined (which, I should still 
hope, he would not finally be), but with your lordship 
(Chesterfield), the Duke of Bedford, my Lord Gower, to 
get as many individuals as we can to carry us through till 
the rebellion is over : and then we shall be at liberty to take 
such part as we shall think most consistent with our own 
honour and the public service.' 1 

Observe : without Pitt we are not in a condition to carry 
on. That is what this letter amounts to, for of Bedford and 
Gower the ministry felt sure, and Cobham was an auxiliary 
who was on and off like a freebooter. The adhesion of Pitt, 
a private member, poor and almost unconnected, was vital 
to a Government which in the public opinion had already 
collected every possible element of strength. So matters 
continued till the meeting of Parliament after the Christ- 
mas recess in January 1746. Pitt held aloof, and had no 
further commerce with the Government. 

A few days before Parliament met, however, he went 
to the Duke of Bedford, inquired as to the foreign policy of 
the Government, showed a disposition to come into it, and 
expressed a wish that some minister would talk it over with 
Lord Cobham, 'into whose hands they had now finally 
committed themselves. ' 2 On this hint Newcastle hurried to 
Cobham, who was reasonable, and 'seemed very desirous 
to come into us and bring his Boys, as he called them. . . . 

1 Newcastle to Chesterfield, Nov. 20, 1745. Add. MSS. 32705. 

2 Newcastle to Chesterfield, Feb. 18, 1746, inCoxe's Pelham Adm. i. 292. 

227 



LORD CHATHAM 

The terms were, Mr. Pitt to be Secretary at War; Lord 
Barrington in the Admiralty; and Mr. James Grenville to 
have an employment of £1000 a year. He flung out Lord 
Denbigh, the Duke of Queensbury, and some Scotch poli- 
ticians, but not as points absolutely to be insisted on.' 

It is useful and edifying to be allowed behind the scenes 
in this way, for such negotiations are now, one would 
imagine, obsolete, or as nearly obsolete as the corruption of 
our fallen nature will allow. Still, one may drop a tear 
in passing over the 'Scotch politicians,' so lightly proffered, 
so lightly dismissed. But let Newcastle continue his 
narrative. 'Upon this I opened the Budget to the King, 
which was better received than I expected, and the only 
objection was to the giving Mr. Pitt the particular office of 
Secretary at War.' Still the Pelhams pressed the appoint- 
ment. Then the goaded and distressed monarch determined 
to make a desperate effort to break from the dominion of 
the Whig hierarchy, so as to carry out his own foreign 
policy, and avoid the admission of Pitt to his counsels. 
At this juncture Bath gained admittance to the Closet, and 
fortified the King's repugnance. He 'represented against 
the behaviour of his ministers in forcing him in such a 
manner to take a disagreeable man into a particular office, 
and thereby dishonouring his Majesty both at home and 
abroad; and encouraging the King to resist it by offering 
him the support of his friends in so doing.' 1 The King, 
caught at this forlorn hope, and gave Bath full power to 
form a new Government. Bath released himself from his 
vow against holding office, accepted the charge with alacrity, 
instantly summoned Carteret, and obtained from the City a 
promise of supplies on terms more favourable than those to 
which Pelham had agreed. Carteret, it need scarcely be 
said, joyfully acceded. The misfortune was that there was 

1 Newcastle to Chesterfield, Feb. 18, 1746, in Coxe's Pelham Adm. i. 293. 

228 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

no one else who did. The Pelham ministry resigned in a 
body. Bath kissed hands as First Minister, and received the 
seals of the Secretaries of State to transmit to Carteret, who 
was ill. The new Secretary at once announced by circular 
his appointment to the foreign ministers. But there all 
ended. When old Horace Walpole was told that this 
ministry was settled he shrewdly remarked : ' I presume in 
the same manner as what we call a settlement in Norfolk; 
when a house is cracked from top to bottom and ready to 
fall, we say it is settled.' 1 Winnington was to have been the 
new Chancellor of the Exchequer. Thrice did the King 
press the seal into his hand, and thrice did Winnington re- 
turn it. 'Your new ministers, sir, can neither support 
Your Majesty nor themselves,' said he. 2 He insisted, 
moreover that they could not depend on more than 3 1 peers 
and 80 commoners. History does not confirm even so 
moderate a computation, but it may be presumed that this 
was the Court contingent on which any minister could count. 
Harrington, one of the actual Secretaries of State, on 
whom the King confidently reckoned for assistance in the 
new arrangement, resigned after a stormy scene with his 
master, who never forgave him. Every one resigned or tried 
to resign, and there was no one to fill their places. To 
Pelham himself Carteret had made overtures, but Pelham 
told the King that the Whig junto would have nothing to 
do with Bath or Carteret. At last, the only measure left 
to the hapless monarch was to shut himself up and forbid 
his door to the crowd that sought admittance in order to 
give up their keys and staves and official insignia. He was 
soon compelled to send for Bath and to tell him that it 
would not do. Bath exhorted him to be firm, and offered by 
means of the Prince of Wales to secure Tory support. But 
with Charles Edward still in arms in the Highlands, the 

1 Coxe's Lord Walpole, ii. 142. 2 lb. ii. 133. 

16 229 



LORD CHATHAM 

King could not bring himself to approach the foes of his 
house, and under no circumstances would he owe salvation 
to his son. Both Princes of Wales, the real and the titular, 
were almost equally repugnant to him. Another version 
of the story states that it was Bath who told the King that 
the project would not work. It matters little which is 
correct, for the position was self-evident, but George was 
probably stouter than Bath. 

Bath kissed hands on February 10 (1746). Two days 
afterwards his ministry had come to an end, and the King 
had sent for Pelham to return. Carteret saw the humour 
of the situation and laughed it away; he owned it a mad 
escapade, but was all the more ready to repeat it. It was 
all over, the King had to surrender to the Whigs, who 
condescended to resume the seals on easy terms, which 
were the proscription of Bath's following and the admis- 
sion of Pitt. The first condition was simple enough, it was 
the natural result of Bath's defeat. Vae victis. 'We im- 
mediately desired,' writes Newcastle, 'that the Court 
might be purged of all their friends and dependents, that 
Lord Bath might be out of the Cabinet Council, the Duke 
of Bolton, Lord Berkeley of Stratton, Mr. William Finch, 
the Vice-Chamberlain, Mr. Edward Finch, the Groom of 
the Bedchamber, Mr. Boone, and the Lord Advocate of 
Scotland (which were all that were left of that sort), should 
be removed.' We have an impression that, in spite of all, 
'the black, funereal Finches' were preserved to the Bed- 
chamber and to the card table, but that does not concern 
this narrative. 

As to the second condition, it was inevitable sooner 
or later, and took place in the form least offensive to the 
Sovereign. But the ministerial crisis and the desperate 
venture with Bath and Carteret testify to the formidable 
position of Pitt and to the equal aversion of the Sovereign. 

230 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

In no less an instance than Pitt's could this repulsion have 
been overcome. 

Pitt himself had begged that his pretensions to the 
Secretaryship at War should not act as an obstacle to an 
accommodation with the King, for there was evidently 
nothing so repugnant to the Sovereign. The King had said 
first that he would not have him in that office at any price, 
then that he would use him ill if he had it, then that he 
would not admit him to his presence to do the business of 
the office if he had it. 1 

There is, if the matter be candidly considered, no just 
cause of reproach in this obstinacy. George II. was a 
gentleman, and a brave gentleman. The Hanoverians were 
his own people, of his own blood and language. Hanover 
was the home in which he had been brought up, the paradise 
to which he always looked longingly from his splendid exile 
in England. The King's personal courage Pitt had publicly 
and wantonly aspersed; Hanover and the Hanoverians he 
had held up to every form of public hatred and contempt. 
One cannot be surprised that George II. would have nothing 
to say to him except under compulsion, and refused, as 
between one gentleman and another, to have personal 
relations with him. As a constitutional ruler his duty 
was another matter, but he would not perform a duty so 
odious except in the last resort. He ignored Pitt even 
after Pitt had entered office. It was four years after Pitt 
became Paymaster that Newcastle, as the result of long 
pressure or intrigue, induced the King even to speak to him. 
This was considered a triumph for the ministry. 2 

Perhaps the Pelhams understood the King's feelings. 
Pitt did without doubt. The King was not now pressed be- 
yond endurance, and Pitt was content for the moment with March 6. 1746 

1 Newcastle to Chesterfield, Feb. 18, 1746. 

2 Orford, i. no. Walpole to Mann, April 2, 1750. 

231 



LORD CHATHAM 

the joint Vice Treasurership of Ireland, in which his partner 
was Walpole's son-in-law, Cholmondeley. The office was 
understood to be lucrative, but he was not destined to hold 
this sinecure for more than a few weeks. He had scarce time 
to ask for exemption from the land tax of four shillings in 
the pound which was charged on his salary for not residing 
in Ireland, or for admission to the Irish Privy Council, both 
customary requests. 1 Two months after he was gazetted 
Winnington died, and Pitt succeeded him in the rich 
office of Paymaster-General. This is a Privy Councillor's 
place, so Pitt had to be admitted to the King's presence to 
take the oath. The King shed tears as Pitt knelt before 
him. A constitutional Sovereign has these bitter moments. 
During the interval between the two appointments Pitt 
had to pay a heavy fee for the first. A vote was demanded 
for 18,000 Hanoverians to be taken into British pay. 
Cobham's young men, one of whom, afterwards Lord Temple, 
'had declared in the House that he would seal it with his 
blood that he never would give his vote for a Hanoverian, ' 
voted the money in silence. Pitt, however, was not content 
to play so abject a part. He stood boldly forth, speaking, 
said Pelham, his new chief, with the dignity of Wyndham, 
the wit of Pulteney, and the knowledge blended with 
judgment of Walpole. Walpole's son thought differently: 

1 Cartwright to Pitt, Feb. 27, 1745 (Chatham MSS.). We obtain the exact 
salary more or less correctly from a lampoon. 
' Hibernia, smile ! 
Thrice happy isle, 
On thy blest ground 
Twelve thousand pound 
For Stanhope's found, 
Three thousand clear 
For Pitt a year; 
So shalt thou thrive, 
Industrious hive, 
While these and more 
Increase thy store.' 

—Sir C. H. Williams, ii. 166. 

232 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

Pitt, he declared, added 'impudence to profligacy; but 
no criminal at the Place de Greve was ever so racked as he 
was by Dr. Lee, a friend of Lord Granville, who gave him 
the question both ordinary and extraordinary.' Probably 
both accounts are true, Lee was one of the Prince of Wales's 
men, and Pitt's relations with his late master were strained 
to the point of rupture by his acceptance of office. 



LORD CHATHAM 



CHAPTER XII 

PITT was now to inhabit the Pay Office, and he gave 
notice to Ann, without any previous quarrel so far 
as we know, that they would henceforth live apart. In any 
case, Pitt's accession to office thus enabled him to put a 
convenient period to what had probably become a fretting 
and irksome arrangement; but Walpole notes at this 
time that there is gossip about 'the new Paymaster's 
menage,' possibly Grattan's tradition of This House to Let.' 
This sort of chit-chat is, however, the inevitable accompani- 
ment of a man in Pitt's position and need not again be 
dwelt upon. Two of his early patrons also quarrelled 
with him : the Prince of Wales and Cobham. But Pitt, for 
the moment at any rate, could afford to do without either. 
A more delicate question required his attention. There 
were habitual practices in the Pay Office which brought in 
immense profits to the Paymaster. It was the custom of 
that official to take poundage on all subsidies paid to 
foreign princes, and to use the great balances at his credit 
for his own purposes of speculation. As to this second 
method Pitt had no doubts, and rejected the idea. As to 
the first he seems, on entering upon office, to have con- 
sulted Pelham. 1 Pelham replied that Winnington had 
taken these perquisites, but that he himself when Pay- 
master had not; Pitt could do as he chose. 'Such a 
manner of stating it left scarce an option in any but the 

1 Camelford. 
234 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

basest of mankind,' remarks Camelford with characteristic 
bitterness. Pitt at any rate did not hesitate, and refused to 
take a farthing beyond his salary, which, in truth, was 
splendid enough. But the indirect profits of the Pay- 
mastership, which earlier in the century had founded the 
dukedom of Chandos and the palace of Canons, and which 
later endowed the peerage of Henry Fox and the glories of 
his exquisite residence at Kensington, besides furnishing 
great fortunes for his graceless sons to squander at the 
gaming-table, were, as Dr. Johnson would have said, be- 
yond the dreams of avarice. It was held in that day of 
loose political morality to be noble, if not unique, for a man 
with a patrimony of a hundred a year and a legacy of ten 
thousand pounds to refuse to receive such profits.' 2 

Lord Camelford's statement may be taken in the main 
to be correct without adopting the sour inference which 
he draws. Pitt may well have asked Pelham as to the 
practice of the office and Pelham have replied in the sense 
indicated. If so, it was nearly as creditable to Pelham as 
to Pitt, for one was scarcely less needy than the other. 
Pelham was a gambler, and so wanted all the money he 
could get. He was a politician, and politicians in those 
days required money for their purposes almost as much as 
gamblers. Lord Camelford implies that had Pelham not 
answered as he did, Pitt would have taken the percentages 
and the balances. This is mere surmise. But, had he done 
so, he could not have been blamed. These perquisites were 
regarded as legitimate by the practice and opinion of the day ; 
the balances were matters of public account. They made 
the Paymaster's office a great prize, a recognised source of 
immense profits. The fact remains that Pitt, or Pitt and 
Pelham, thought them improper, and refused to take them. 

One signal difference must, however, be observed. 

1 Cf. Underwood MSS. (Hist. MSS.), p. 405. 
235 



LORD CHATHAM 

Pelham abstained silently, the abstinence of Pitt was widely 
known. This notoriety may have been partly due to the 
fact that the King of Sardinia, having heard of Pitt's refusal 
to deduct the percentage on the Sardinian subsidy, sent 
to offer him a large present, which Pitt unhesitatingly 
declined. But there was another reason, which colours 
Pitt's whole life, and which may therefore well be noted 
here. His light was never hid under any sort of bushel, 
and he did not intend that it should be. He already saw 
that his power lay with the people, and that it was based 
not merely on his genius and eloquence, but on a faith in 
his public spirit and scrupulous integrity. His virtues were 
his credentials, and it was necessary that they should be 
conspicuous. Pulteney and St. John had wielded greater 
Parliamentary power, yet Pulteney and St. John had 
perished from want of character. Character he saw was 
the one necessary thing, but character must be known to 
be appreciated. Pitt was perhaps the first of those states- 
men who sedulously imbue the public with a knowledge of 
their merit. He can scarcely be called an advertiser, but 
he was the ancestor of advertisers. Other statesmen no 
doubt had paid their pamphleteers. Pitt paid nobody, but 
he inspired; he had hangers-on who clung to the skirts of 
his growing fortune. This is not to imply that he had not a 
genuine scorn of meanness and corruption and the baser arts 
of politics. He had to use them through others ; he had to 
ally himself with Newcastle and his gang; he could not 
govern otherwise. But he was anxious that the public 
should know that he was something apart from and above 
these politicians. His was a real but not a retiring purity; 
a white column rather than a snowdrop. This was all part 
of his essentially theatrical character, which he had found 
successful in Parliament, and which gradually absorbed 
him, with unhappy results. 

236 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

But there was another reason why it was necessary that 
Pitt should advertise his virtue on this occasion. He was 
a patriot joining the Court party, a member of the Opposi- 
tion accepting a place, which, with all deductions, had a 
fixed and ample salary. It was not possible for him, 
though his friends were already established in office, to join 
them without some loss of popularity. It was difficult for 
him to keep his shield untarnished in the royal armoury. 
The morose Glover states that he brought himself to the 
level of Lord Bath in public disfavour by his acceptance of 
office. Pitt himself, at the time of his bitter mortification in 
1754, writes to Lord Hardwicke of his 'bearing long a load 
of obloquy for supporting the King's measures,' without 
the smallest abatement of the King's hostility, and about 
the same time describes himself as having parted with 
that weight in the country which arose from his independent 
opposition to the measures of the Government. He must 
indeed have counted the cost. It seemed obvious and in 
the nature of things that Lytteltons, Grenvilles, and Cob- 
hams should follow the other patriots into office when 
opportunity offered; they had no doubt barked loudly at 
ministers, but they belonged to the families which always 
governed the country, and it was proper, indeed inevitable, 
that they should take up their predestined positions on the 
Treasury Bench. . But Pitt had stood on a different 
pedestal. He had been marked out by Walpole for punish- 
ment and by the King for exclusion. He had thundered 
against the King and the King's trusted Ministers, the Wal- 
poles and the Carterets, with a voice that overbore all others, 
and which apparently could not be silenced. The people 
seemed at last to have found an incorruptible champion. 
Then suddenly he was muzzled with a sinecure. Had he 
insisted on the Secretaryship of War and wrenched it from 
the reluctant sovereign, the position would have been 

237 



LORD CHATHAM 

totally different. But to pass into the sleek silence of the 
Vice-Treasurership, and almost to disappear from sight or 
hearing for eight years, seemed a moral collapse. It is 
not one of the least remarkable features of Pitt's career 
that he should have survived this lucrative obscurity. 

It is indeed difficult to understand how so fierce and 
restless a spirit could have endured the passive existence to 
which he had restrained himself by the acceptance of office. 
We seem to hear a growl but a few months after he had 
become Paymaster. 'In the gloomy scene which, I fear, 
is opening in public affairs for this disgraced country,' he 
writes to George Grenville in October 1746; not a cheerful 
tone for a young minister, but one not unfamiliar among 
those in subordinate positions. Still he could afford to wait. 
He probably contented himself with the reflection that King 
George could not last forever, and flattered himself with an 
easy entrance to the councils of King Frederick. He could 
watch, too, with silent scorn, the miscarriages of his official 
superiors, confident that high office must come to him, as it 
were, of its own accord. Still, he had to wait long, and the 
death of Frederick as well as the longevity of the monarch 
were little less than disastrous to his calculations. It would 
have been better, of course, for his historical position had he 
refrained from taking a subordinate office, which restrained 
his independence, and deprived him of the peculiar lustre of 
his lonely power. In these days we ask ourselves what 
temptation could induce him to accept a post which seemed 
to offer nothing but salary in exchange for the exceptional 
splendour of his independent position? How was it worth 
his while to become Vice-Treasurer of Ireland? It cannot 
have been for money. He was notoriously indifferent to 
money (though his nephew casts doubts even on this), and 
he was better off as to money than he had ever been before, 
owing to the Marlborough legacy. It may have been that 

238 






HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

as his political associates had all joined the administration, 
he thought that his loneliness impaired his power, and he 
must certainly have felt that it was impossible for him to 
continue in active and effective opposition to a Government 
which included his closest friends. That would seem to be 
the chief and conspicuous reason. But there was another, 
as one may well suppose, which was not less potent. Office 
is the natural, legitimate and honourable object of all poli- 
ticians who feel capable of doing good work as ministers, 
and even of some who do not. The instances to the contrary 
are so few as to prove the rule. Wilberforce and Burdett, 
Ashley (for Ashley, though not literally outside the category 
of officials, cannot be considered as one), and Cobden are the 
names that obviously present themselves. But Ashley and 
Wilberforce had consecrated themselves to a high career of 
philanthropy which was incompatible with the bond of 
ministry. Burdett, long a popular idol and an orator of 
great power, a country gentleman of the best type, and 
personally agreeable even to those who differed from him, 
was probably held to be too advanced a demagogue to be 
even considered for an appointment. Cobden refused office 
at least twice ; yet had he lived he could not have kept out 
of it. Bright, his illustrious political twin, the Castor to his 
Pollux, took it and liked it. In the eighteenth century we 
can think of no one but Pulteney. He, indeed, strictly 
speaking, is no exception, for as a youth he held a sub- 
ordinate post. And though in the maturity of his powers he 
refused the first place when apparently he might have had 
it, he also solicited it when it was out of his reach. 

Althorp too, in the last century, is a singular example. 
He led the House of Commons for four years as Chancellor 
of the Exchequer, when his popularity and ascendancy made 
him the real pivot of the Government. But he hated office 
with so deadly a hatred that he had the pistols removed 

239 



LORD CHATHAM 

from his room lest he should end his official career with 
them. He really comes in the list of exceptions to the rule 
that office is the goal of all capable politicians. 

But Pitt had nothing in common with these men. He 
wished to be in office, and he knew that he would be a 
better minister than any there, even though he may not 
have felt already the confidence which he afterwards ex- 
pressed that he alone could save England. How then was 
he to obtain a foothold in the ministry? The just repug- 
nance of the King was, he knew, insurmountable, so long as 
he remained outside. But if admitted to office he might 
well hope much from his power of fascination, which was 
almost famous. The King was not an easy person for 
any man to charm; but Pitt no doubt felt that if he could 
once be placed in contact with His Majesty, he might be 
able to remove the royal prejudice, though in that he seems 
to have been wrong. He tried his hand on Lady Yarmouth, 
with whom at a later period he seems to have been on a 
familiar footing; but it is doubtful if she ever dispelled, 
though she may have mitigated, the King's hatred of Pitt. 

Even failing the mollification of the King, he felt that 
by taking office he would have entered the official caste, 
and he would have placed his foot on one rung of the ladder 
of greatness. In accepting the Vice-Treasurership he had 
doubtless been promised the next post that was vacant, 
and was, as has been seen, given the Paymastership. He 
was thus reunited to all his political friends, and would 
form with them a solid proportion of the garrison of Down- 
ing Street, a proportion to be reckoned with. It would 
be strange indeed if in .such a position and with such feeble 
superiors he did not make his way to some position of real 
business and power. 

It must be remembered, too, that the state of affairs as 
regards office in the eighteenth century was very different 

240 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

from the present. Now, if a man be a bold and popular 
speaker, both in Parliament and on the platform, but more 
especially on the platform, he leaps into the Cabinet at 
once ; he disdains anything else ; a Vice-Treasurership such 
as Pitt accepted he would regard as an insult. But in the 
middle of the eighteenth century there was nothing of this. 
There was no such thing as platform speaking outside the 
religious movement. A man made himself prominent and 
formidable in Parliament, but that was a small part of the 
necessary qualifications for office. The Sovereign then 
exercised a control, not indeed absolute, but efficacious and 
material, on the selection of ministers. The great posts 
were mainly given to peers; while a peerage is now as 
regards office in the nature of an impediment, if not a 
disqualification. In those days an industrious duke, or 
even one like Grafton who was not industrious, could 
have almost what he chose. But most of the great poten- 
tates preferred to brood over affairs in company with 
hangers-on who brought them the news, or with their 
feudal members of parliament. Still they formed a vital 
element in the governments of that time. Pelham's ad- 
ministration at this very time contained five dukes: he 
himself was the only commoner in it, and he was a duke's 
brother. It was necessary to have a Chancellor of the 
Exchequer in the House of Commons, but all the other 
high offices could be held preferably by peers. The two 
Secretaries of State were both dukes. A brilliant com- 
moner without family connection or great fortune was an 
efficient gladiator to be employed in the service of these 
princes, but he was not allowed to rise beyond a fixed line. 
The peers lived, as it were, in the steward's room, and the 
commoners in the servants' hall; in some parlour, high 
above all, sate the King. 

Pitt, according to the practice of the twentieth century, 

241 



LORD CHATHAM 

would have received at least the highest office outside or, 
more probably, office within the Cabinet on the fall of 
Walpole, and he certainly would have been a Secretary of 
State or the equivalent before 1746. As it was, in that 
year he had to climb on hands and knees into a subordinate 
position. It had been difficult for him to get even that 
far at the cost of a ministerial crisis of capital importance. 
The veto of the King had certainly been the principal 
obstacle. But the iron rules of caste forbade any idea of 
office for Pitt at all commensurate with his importance. 
He had under the system in force to get in as he could, 
and into much the same sort of office as his inferior but 
more influent ially connected colleagues, the Grenvilles, 
the Lytteltons, and the like. 

There was another weighty consideration which pointed 
to prompt acceptance. Pitt had no time to spare. He was 
no longer in his first youth, he was approaching middle age. 
When he accepted this subordinate post he was thirty-eight ; 
and thirty-eight, it may be said, when the lives of statesmen 
were comparatively short, was a more mature period in a 
career than it would be considered now. At the age when 
Pitt became Vice-Treasurer of Ireland, North was already 
Prime Minister. Pitt was now seven years older than 
Grafton when he became Prime Minister, and fifteen years 
older than his own son when he first led the House of 
Commons as Chancellor of the Exchequer; both, of course, 
under circumstances abnormally propitious. These figures 
show sufficiently not merely that Pitt's career was, so to 
speak, in arrear, but that the youthfulness of ministers in 
those days, under the favouring breezes of birth and 
connection, affords no standard of comparison for the 
possibilities of a poor country gentleman with no such 
advantages. Pitt was, indeed, rather old than young of 
his age. His sickly youth and his habitual infirmities had 

242 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

aged him beyond his years. But it must be noted in pass- 
ing that, in spite of the dire impetuosity of his character, 
all his steps in life, except his entry into Parliament, were 
tardy and delayed. He was forty -six when he married, 
and forty-eight when he first entered the Cabinet; he was 
thirty-eight when he first obtained office. He moved slowly, 
but not patiently. His glowing nature, thrown back on 
itself, exacerbated by rebuffs and neglect, all fused into a 
fierce scorn, the scsva indignatio of Swift, gathered strength 
and intensity in its restrained progress, until it developed 
into a spirit not indeed amiable or attractive, but of indomi- 
table and superhuman force. That was the process which 
was at work in the shade of subordinate office. 

This consideration leads us to what is the best, and 
probably the true, explanation of this voluntary eclipse: 
that in taking office he was taking leave of his youth and 
of his past, and embarking on a new phase of his career. 
Up to this time he had, like a predatory animal, lived 
wholly on attack, and had given no thought to consistency, 
and little to his future. He had only been a rattling- 
politician, determined to make his way, thinking only of the 
game, and of how to develop and display his powers of 
oratory. He had been content to adopt Cobham's enemies 
as his own, and had tried on them the temper of his virgin 
sword, without much caring who they were or why he 
attacked them, so long as they were sufficiently prominent 
to give notoriety to their assailant. His course had been 
one of brilliant recklessness and of striking eloquence; 
but at bottom it had been nothing but faction. There 
have been many such swashbucklers in our history, and 
there will be many more. But it is rare that, as in Pitt's 
case, they develop into something supreme. With Pitt 
these extravagancies had only been the frolics of genius. 
By burying himself in the sedateness and reticence of 

243 



LORD CHATHAM 

office, Pitt sought to break with his dazzling indiscretions, 
and mature himself for statesmanship. He retired behind 
a screen in order to change his dress. That, one may 
infer, was his design; that, certainly, was the effect. 

To make an end of this topic, one may ask why Pitt, 
so fertile of invective himself, was not the subject of exe- 
cration when he joined the Court. Great men no doubt 
may commit faults, even crimes, with impunity, for the 
lustre of their achievements throws a shadow over their 
errors. In such men it is recognised that all is usually 
on a colossal scale, deeds and misdeeds alike. As they are 
capable of gigantic successes, they are also capable of 
stupendous blunders. This is true of Pitt's whole career, 
but it does not explain the facility with which he was now 
able, before he had his famous administration to his credit, 
to subside into an easy placeman and vindicate the measures 
which he had previously denounced. A few lampoons were 
of course launched at so tempting an object, but he was not 
made a conspicuous butt. Nor does he seem to have lost, 
or if he did he soon regained, the ear and confidence of the 
people. He had at all periods rare powers of recovery. 
But in this case the fact is not difficult to explain. In the 
first place it must be borne in mind that what he did was the 
ordinary thing to do. Again, his personal friends, and even 
those who had intercourse with him, were impressed by his 
character and believed in his integrity. Then the refusal of 
the indirect profits counted for much, it gave an air of austere 
virtue to a proceeding otherwise questionable. Again, there 
was no particular object to be gained by attacking him. 
Who indeed was there to attack him? No one thought it 
worth their while to subsidise Grub Street for the purpose 
of throwing dirt on a silent Paymaster, and few dared 
attack him to his face. He had already inspired the 
House of Commons with that awe of him which subsisted 

244 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

and increased so long as he remained there. To deliver a 
philippic against Pitt was no joking matter; it required a 
man with iron nerves who was reckless of retribution. Lee, 
as we have seen, had attempted one, but, in spite of Horace 
Walpole's eulogy, he does not seem to have repeated the 
experiment. Hampden also attacked him, as we shall see, 
in terms which would have led to a duel had not the Speaker 
interposed his authority. Fox and Grenville withstood 
him doggedly in after years. Barre, when an obscure 
Irish adventurer, tried an attack not altogether without 
success, but did not care to renew the attempt, and became, 
in fact, Pitt's devoted follower. But these instances must 
be considered as singularly rare when it is remembered how 
tempting a mark was presented by Pitt's career, how frank 
and direct was the language of Parliament, and how generous 
the potations which flushed its debates. Murray, Pitt's 
contemporary and his equal in sheer ability, cowered be- 
fore him; cowered with loathing, but cowered. 1 Pitt was 
already surrounded, and as years went on completely en- 
compassed, with an armour and atmosphere of terror which 
rendered him almost impregnable to personal collisions 
throughout his career in the House of Commons. Some 
who had nothing to lose and everything to gain baited 
him from time to time, but they were always tossed back 
with damage. Such persistent assailants as he had, and 
they only appeared in force long afterwards, were mainly 
anonymous. 

Whatever the cause may have been, Pitt, from his 
accession to office in 1746, remains in obscurity and almost 
in silence (so far as the records testify, though it is evident 
that these are extremely imperfect) for eight long years, at 
the potent period of life which ranges from thirty -eight to 

1 He avowed this to Newcastle (Orford, George III. i. 82 note). But it 
was otherwise patent. 

17 245 



LORD CHATHAM 

forty-six, the age at which Napoleon closed his career, but 
which was yet two years earlier than the commencement of 
Pitt's. During this long eclipse of ambition and stormy 
vigour he gives but few signs of life for the most diligent 
chronicler to note. But he had no sooner been appointed 
Paymaster than an incident took place which seemed to 
point to a sudden dawn of royal favour. The Duke of 
Cumberland's achievements in Scotland were to be re- 
warded by a pension of £40,000 a year, and the King ex- 
pressed a wish that the motion to this effect should be 
made by Pitt. It is, however, evident that this was not 
a mark of royal affection, but rather of a royal desire to 
utilise the new acquisition to the Government, and in a way 
so little congenial as to make Pitt feel the collar on his 
neck. The King may have wished to display his captive in 
chains. But Cumberland, who did not love Pitt, declined 
this mark of regard, and Pelham fulfilled the honorary duty. 
Cumberland had earned this grant, as well as his name 
of 'the Butcher,' by his victory at Culloden, and the 
barbarity with which he had followed up his success. 
Fortunately for him, it never occurred to a grateful country 
to draw up a debtor and creditor account as between the 
nation and the Duke. Had it done so, there would have 
been no grant ; for his defeats, both in number and in 
importance, represented something much more consider- 
able than this easy and solitary triumph, which would 
have been amply compensated by Swift's 'frankincense 
and earthern pots to burn it in' at £4 10s., with 'a bull 
for sacrifice' at £8. However, mingling vengeance with 
gratitude, Parliament now plunged itself with zest into the 
horrors of the trials of some adventurous or bankrupt 
gentlemen who had followed Charles Edward, so that Pitt, 
even had he so desired, had no opportunity of breaking 
silence. No speech of his is recorded, indeed, till 1748. 

246 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

In the meantime he had been compelled to exchange 
Old Sarum for the ministerial borough of Seaford, one of 
the Cinque Ports; for Old Sarum was no longer tenable. 
The lord of Old Sarum, his brother Thomas, was a liege 
servant of the Prince of Wales, who was now once more 
in violent opposition, and who indeed ran two candidates, 
Lord Middlesex, a member of his household, and Mr. Gage, 
the sitting member, at Seaford in opposition to the minis- 
terial men, William Pitt and William Hay. This pro- 
ceeding sufficiently indicates the violence and completeness 
of the rupture between Pitt and his former master, brought 
about by acceptance of office. So tense indeed was the 
contest that Newcastle posted down to Seaford in person, 
held a levee of the voters whom he wooed with copious 
solicitation and refreshment, and during the poll sat by the 
returning officer to overawe the corrupt and limited con- 
stituency. He was victorious ; Lord Middlesex exchanging 
seats with Pitt, for after this his defeat he was brought in 
by Thomas Pitt for Old Sarum. Newcastle's proceedings 
furnished matter for a petition to the House of Commons. 
This Pitt treated with contempt and 'turned into a mere Nov. 
jest,' 1 but Potter, son of the Primate, a clever scapegrace, 
of whom we shall hear again, spoke vigorously in support 
of the petition. This, however, had little chance against 
the argument of a compact parliamentary majority, which 
rejected it by 247 to 96. But it is strange to find Pitt 
treating purity of election with ridicule : all the more strange 
when we remember that seven years afterwards he delivered 
one of his most famous speeches in awful rebuke of the 
same levity on the same subject. ' Was the dignity of the 
House of Commons on so sure foundations that they might 
venture themselves to shake it by jokes on electoral bribery ?' 
It was thus that the House might dwindle into a little 

1 Pari. Hist. xiv. 103. 
247 



LORD CHATHAM 

assembly serving only 'to register the abitrary edicts of 
one too powerful a subject.' It was the arbitrary inter- 
ference of the same too powerful subject in a parliamentary 
election that Pitt was now screening with jesting scorn. 
But Pitt thought little of consistency, and he might well 
have forgotten for the moment his earlier performance, 
when seeing and seizing the opportunity for a speech which 
placed him on a moral elevation above the House of Com- 
mons. 

In 1748 we find him intervening comically enough in 
an affair, suspiciously like a local job, which affected his 
friends, the Grenvilles, and which proved the bitter and 
jealous animosity with which they were regarded. 

Hitherto the summer assizes for Buckinghamshire had 
been held at Buckingham, and the winter at Aylesbury; 
but suddenly the summer assizes had also been transferred 
to Aylesbury. The reason seems to have been simple 
enough; for the gaol being at Aylesbury, prisoners had to 
be transferred thence and back again when the assizes 
were at Buckingham. , Richard Grenville (afterwards Lord 
Temple), however, for obvious reasons, took up the cudgels 
for Buckingham, which was the close neighbour and 
borough of Stowe, and brought in a bill to enact that the 
summer assizes should be held at that town. All Bucks 
rushed into the conflict, and as is generally the case in 
a local affair, the debate was extraordinarily diverting. 
Richard Grenville, Sir William Stanhope of Eythrope, the 
brother of Chesterfield, and afterwards a brother of the 
famous or infamous Medmenham fraternity, Potter again, 
who had now become secretary to the Prince of Wales, 
who was soon to be member for Aylesbury, probably for his 
services on this occasion, and also a future monk of Medmen- 
ham, George Grenville, the solemn figure of Pitt, Robert 
Nugent (whose daughter married George Grenville's son), 

248 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

Lee of Hartwell, were all visible and ardent in the thick 
of the battle. Henry Fox, then a friend of Pitt, was the 
only outside member who intervened, and then with a sort 
of puzzled surprise at the fury of the combatants. Sir 
William Stanhope, who led the attack on Buckingham, 
made a speech which was specially piquant. He began: 
'Sir, if I did not think I could prove that this Bill is the 
arrantest job that was ever brought to Parliament, I should 
not give the House the trouble of hearing me.' He attrib- 
uted the Bill to the fact that the County of Bucks had 
not elected two Grenvilles as their members. 'Here let 
me condole with that unhappy, rather that blinded, county 
who neglected to choose two gentlemen of such power and 
interest that I am persuaded they will have more votes in 
this House to-day than they would have had at the General 
Election in the whole county in question if they had done 
it the honour to offer themselves for representatives.' 
After this bitter exordium he proceeded: 'It is the power 
and interest of these gentlemen that I am afraid of, not of 
their arguments ' ; with good reason, for though to posterity 
the claim of Aylesbury with its gaol will seem conclusive, 
the Bill was triumphantly carried. But Stanhope proceeded 
with an invective against Cobham's young patriots so 
violent as to be checked by the Speaker. It is noteworthy 
as showing the jealousy and hostility with which their 
rise and power were regarded in the House, and so merits 
quotation : — 

And to shew you, Sir, how sensible they are of the frivolous- 
ness of the latter, I could recapitulate such instances of intriguing 
for votes, as no man would believe who does not know those 
gentlemen. Conscious of the badness of their cause, they have 
employed every bad art to support it, and have retained so much 
of their former patriotism, as consisted in blackening their ad- 
versaries and acquiring auxiliaries. They have propagated such 

249 



LORD CHATHAM 

tales, that men have overlooked the improbabilities, while they 
wondered at the foolishness of them ; and they have solicited the 
attendance of their friends, and of their friends' friends, with 
as much importunity as if their power itself was tottering, not 
the wanton exercise of it opposed: the only aid they have failed 
to call in was reason, the natural but baffled enemy of their 
family: a family, Sir, possessed of every honour they formerly 
decried, fallen from every honour they formerly acquired: a 
family, Sir, who coloured over ambition with patriotism, dis- 
guised emptiness by noise, and disgraced every virtue by wearing 
them only for mercenary purposes: a family Sir, who from being 
the most clamorous incendiaries against power and places, are 
possessed of more employments than the most comprehensive 
place-bill that ever was brought into parliament would include; 
and who, to every indignity offered to their royal master, have 
added that greatest of all, intrusion of themselves into his pres- 
ence and councils; and who shew him what he has still farther 
to expect, by their scandalous ingratitude to his son; a family 
Sir, raised from obscurity by the petulance of the times, drawn 
up higher by the insolence of their bribing kinsman, and sup- 
ported by the timidity of two ministers, who, to secure their 
own persons from abuse have sacrificed their own party to this 
all-grasping family, the elder ones of which riot in the spoils of 
their treachery and places, and the younger .... 

At this point he was, not prematurely, called to order. 
Stanhope brought up Pitt, portentous but unconvincing, 
with perhaps a unique expression, for he addressed the 
Speaker as 'dear Sir.' 'They (the Grenvilles) desire the 
assizes may be sometimes held at Buckingham; the point 
he (Stanhope) espouses is that they should be always held 
at Aylesbury. Which, dear Sir, looks most like a mono- 
poly?' Then he proceeds to defend the Grenvilles. 

After so happy a beginning, he falls into a torrent of violent 
abuse on a whole family, founded on no reason in the world, but 
because that family is distinguished by the just rewards of their 
services to their king and country; and, in the heat of his resent- 

250 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

ment, he throws out things that are as unpardonably seditious 
as they are palpably absurd. He takes it for granted that men 
force themselves into a presence and into councils to which they 
have the honour to be called, and into which our Constitution 
renders it impossible for any to intrude. In the same breath 
he makes entering into a father's service an act of ingratitude to 
a son; and, without so much as pretending to assign either facts 
or reasons, he bestows the most low and infamous epithets upon 
characters that all other men mention with esteem. In a word, 
he forgot himself to such a degree that he pointed out men of 
birth and fortune, and in high stations, as if they were the most 
abandoned and profligate creatures in the universe, without 
parts, without morals, without shame, and who, if his description 
had in it the least tittle of truth, instead of being Members of 
Parliament, or admitted to the Privy Council, were fit only to 
be members of a society once famous by the name of the Hell- 
fire Club. 1 

It is not worth while to follow this local squabble further, 
except to notice the singular atmosphere of jobbery with 
which it was surrounded. By a job, it was alleged, Lord 
Chief Justice Baldwin, having purchased the manor of 
Aylesbury in the reign of Henry VIII., had transferred the 
assizes from Buckingham to Aylesbury. By another job a 
judge who was a native of Buckingham had managed that 
the summer assizes should be always held at Buckingham 
while he lived. 'The arrantest job,' cried Stanhope. ' One 
of the worst sort of jobs,' echoed Potter, who divided jobs 
into two species, one laudable and the other infamous, de- 
claring this to be one of the latter kind. Lee also called it a 
private job of the most infamous kind. Articulate Bucking- 
hamshire was indeed unanimous against the Bill. But the 
Grenvilles were now powerful with all the insolence of 
power, and the Government smiled silently on their enter- 
prise; though Nugent said they could only have done so 

1 See the debate in Pari. Hist. xiv. 204. 
251 



LORD CHATHAM 

from weariness of political serenity, and the wish to invite 
catastrophe. So the Bill was carried, and the job, whatever 
its exact denomination may have been, lasted for nearly a 
century. 1 But the debate, as will be seen, is significant 
because it shows the resentment which had long been grow- 
ing, but which was now openly displayed against Cobham's 
aggressive and ambitious group. 

We do not again hear Pitt's voice till 1749, when he 
vindicated the proposal of the Government to pay to 
Glasgow ten thousand pounds to reimburse the city in 
some degree for what the occupation of the Jacobites had 
cost it. This of course was an official speech and of no 
permanent interest. 2 He had to prove that the case of 
Glasgow stood by itself, and that there was no analogy 
between this and those of other towns which made the 
same claim. Two of his points are incidentally worthy of 
remark. The first is that it was the whole tenor of Glas- 
gow's conduct since the Reformation which had drawn 
upon it the resentment of the Jacobites; the second, that 
if this payment were not made, and made promptly, Glasgow 
must be ruined. He told, too, a story which merits pre- 
servation. When there were rumours in 1688 of the com- 
ing of William III. with 30,000 men, an adherent of James II. 
made light of the matter; when it was said that the prince 
was coming with 20,000 he began to be alarmed; but when 
he heard that the expeditionary force numbered only 
14,000 he cried, 'We are undone: an army of 30,000 men 
could not conquer England. But no man would come 
here with only 14,000 unless he were sure of finding a great 
many traitors among ourselves.' 3 

1 Gibbs' History of Aylesbury, 502. 

2 Torrens says (History of Cabinets, ii. 119) that this speech was revised 
by Pitt, but gives no authority. Almon (i. 172) specifically declares that it 
was written by Gordon. 

3 Pari. Hist. xiv. 502. 

252 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

In 1750 there is a faint echo of Pitt's voice in a dis- 
cussion on the annual Mutiny Bill, at least the only echo 
in the recorded debates, for we learn from two letters of 
Pitt's to George Grenville that there had been other long 
and troublesome discussions in which he had had officially 
to bear much of the burden. 1 Colonel Townshend brought 
forward the case of non-commissioned officers who had been 
broke or reduced to the ranks without any cause assigned. 
Some of these, he said, were waiting at the bar as he spoke. 
He proposed a clause for preventing this abuse, and for- 
bidding these punishments except under sentence of a 
court-martial. Pitt took the line, truly enough, that if 
soldiers were on every occasion to bring their complaints 
against their officers to the House for redress there would be 
an end to all discipline; and proceeded in the tone of a 
Paymaster-General to declare that the business of the 
House was to consider the requisite number of the forces 
and to grant money for their payment, but that the conduct 
of the army or complaints against one another were solely 
within the province of the King or those commissioned by 
His Majesty. 2 This need not detain us. About the same 
time, Lord Egmont, who now represented the Prince of 
Wales in the House of Commons, an able man not without 
incredible absurdities, brought forward a mischievous 
motion with regard to Dunkirk. The question which he 
raised was whether the French had demolished the fortifi- 
cations erected during the late war, as by the Treaty of 
Aix la Chapelle they were bound to do; but he diverged 
into a general attack upon the provisions of that Treaty. 
Pelham answered him in a speech of remarkable candour. 
Lord Strange followed and brought up Pitt. He de- 
fended the peace, which indeed was not difficult, in a 
speech eminently discreet, ministerial, and conciliatory. No 

1 Grenville Papers, i. 93-5. 2 Pari. Hist. xiv. 664. 

253 



LORD CHATHAM 

one could discover in it any germ of the policy he was 
destined afterwards to pursue with such triumphant success. 
But he cast an interesting light on the Peace of Aix la 
Chapelle. 'If there be any secret in the late affairs of 
Europe,' he said, 'it is in the question how it was possible 
for our ministers to obtain so good a peace as they did. 
For I must confess that when the French laid siege to 
Maestricht in the beginning of 1748, I had such a gloomy 
prospect of affairs that I thought it next to impossible to 
preserve our friends the Dutch from the imminent ruin 
they were then threatened with, or to maintain the present 
Emperor upon the imperial throne.' 1 Though he had thus 
already spoken, he wound up the debate for the ministry, 
and did so with equal discretion. 

This was in February, 1750. He seems to have spoken 
no more that session, but in August Pelham wrote to his 
brother: 'I think him the most able and useful man we 
have among us, truly honourable and strictly honest. He 
Aug. 3-14, i s as fi rm a friend to us as we can wish for, and a more 
useful one does not exist.' 2 Such an eulogy, offered in 
confidence by a Prime Minister, a reticent, unemotional 
man, seems to us a great mark and epoch in Pitt's career. 
Not 'the most brilliant,' not 'the most eloquent,' not 'the 
most intrepid,' as we should have expected, but 'the most 
useful, able, and strictly honest.' 

Pitt had earned this praise by exertions which were not 
visible to the outer world. It often happens that there is 
a member of Government whose merits do not appeal to 
the public, who is no orator, who passes no measures, whose 
conversation does not attract, and whose position in an 
administration is a puzzle to the outer world. And yet 
perhaps his colleagues regard him as invaluable. He is 
probably the peacemaker, the man who walks about drop- 

1 Pari. Hist. xiv. 692-6. 2 Coxe's Pelham Adm. ii. 370. 

254 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

ping oil into the machinery, and preventing injurious fric- 
tion. This had recently been Pitt's position. He had been 
diligently and unobtrusively trying to keep the Government 
together. This was not so easy as it would seem ; for though 
the brothers Pelham had arranged it to their will when they 
ejected Carteret, the morbid and intolerable jealousies of 
Newcastle prevented any ease. Did other subjects of 
intrigue and irritation fail he would quarrel with his brother, 
for when all else was serene it would secretly chafe him 
that his junior should be in the first place and he only 
in the second. Henry himself, it may be noted, seems 
to have been both blameless and placable on these occasions, 
but naturally bored. The elder brother would begin 
whimpering and whining to Hardwicke, his prop and 
confidant. Hardwicke woiild soothe him as a sick baby is 
soothed, eventually his tears would be dried, and he would 
begin burrowing and intriguing in some other direction. 

On this occasion the trouble arose over Bedford. Bedford 
had become Joint Secretary of State with Newcastle on the 
resignation of Chesterfield. Sandwich, a clever scapegrace, 
and Bedford's henchman, had been Newcastle's candidate 
for the office, while Henry Fox had been strongly supported 
by Pitt and others. Before offering it to Sandwich, it was 
thought well to make an honorary tender of the post to 
Bedford, in the belief that he would refuse it. Bedford, 
as sometimes happens on such occasions, had promptly 
accepted it ; for six months as he said, but, as also happens, 
for as long as he could keep it, which was more than three 
years. The appointment was thus distasteful in its origin 
to Newcastle and became more irksome with experience. 
Bedford as a minister was indolent, and as a man was 
obstinate and unamiable to a singular degree. But it was 
not these drawbacks which attracted the malevolent at- 
tention of Newcastle. Bedford, no doubt, was difficult 

255 



LORD CHATHAM 

to work with, and Newcastle soon wished to be rid of him. 
But it was when Bedford became well with the Court, 
with the King and with Princess Amelia, for whom New- 
castle had once affected to feel something more tender 
than friendship, with the Duke of Cumberland and Lady 
Yarmouth, that Newcastle's hatred passed the bounds of 
moderation and almost of sanity. Pelham, who knew the 
parliamentary power of Bedford and who was anxious 
not to alienate it, was reluctant to take up his brother's 
dispute ; so Newcastle promptly quarrelled with him. Pitt 
intervened. Had he been blindly ambitious, he would have 
welcomed a schism which might have produced a much 
greater position for himself. But he saw that a quarrel 
between the brethren would break up the Ministry; and 
that such a destruction would involve grave consequences, 
difficult to calculate, and possibly the resuscitation of Car- 
teret in the first place. Moreover, though on the whole he 
sided with Newcastle, as Fox sided with Pelham, he could 
not but be aware of the priceless merits of Pelham as a party 
manager, as one who allayed animosities, and as one who 
kept the peace. Pelham, in writing to Newcastle, affects 
to diminish the value of Pitt's intervention, as he wishes 
to attribute the renewal of harmony to 'natural affection.' 
But an impartial judgment comes to a different conclusion. 
Natural affection had not prevented discord, and was in- 
sufficient to produce reconciliation. It is at all times an 
indifferent political cement. But the exertions of an in- 
dependent colleague such as Pitt could not be overestimated. 
There exists a long and earnest letter of July 13, 1750, 
from Pitt to Newcastle, too long and too tedious to quote, 
but which is both tactful and energetic, though in his worst 
style of winding verbosity. ' I don't hazard much, ' he wrote, 
'in venturing to prophesy that two brothers who love one 
another, and two ministers essentially necessary to each 

256 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

other, will never suffer themselves to be divided further than 
the nearest friends by difference of opinion or even little 
ruffles of temper may occasionally be. Give me leave,' he 
continues, 'to suggest a doubt. May not frequent re- 
proaches upon one subject gall and irritate a mind not 
conscious, intentionally at least, of giving cause?' and so 
forth. 1 He concludes all this with warm eulogies on New- 
castle's conduct of foreign affairs, and soothes and flatters 
the fretful duke with something like sympathetic regard. 
He or 'natural affection' is successful, for, a week after- 
wards, he writes a brief note on another subject, which ends 
thus: 'I am glad to note that the understanding between 
you and Mr. Pelham, for which I had fears, is reestablished.' 2 
It is pleasant thus to catch a glimpse of Pitt as a loyal 
colleague, strenuously patching up differences; not less 
pleasant to see him pushing the claims of his rival, Fox, 
to be Secretary of State. This is a new, human, and at- 
tractive aspect. 

The termination of the Bedford transaction is worth 
noticing.for more reasons than one. The King, though he 
was at least indifferent to Bedford, declined to remove him 
at the instance of Newcastle, and was probably pleased to 
have the opportunity of thwarting the tiresome minister 
who had been the inseparable bane and necessity of his life. 
Pelham would not intervene directly for other reasons. A 
characteristic and tortuous method was therefore adopted. 
The King cared nothing for Sandwich, who was necessary 
to Bedford. So the brothers suggested the removal of 
Sandwich, to which the King promptly acceded, and 
Bedford, as they had foreseen, instantly resigned. 

Two points are notable with regard to the vacancy 
thus caused. The Prime Minister announced that the 
nomination of Bedford's successor must be left to the sole 

1 Add. MSS. 32721. 2 July 20, 1750. Add. MSS. 32721. 

257 



LORD CHATHAM 

nomination of the King, with which he would not interfere 
in any way, but insisted that he must be a peer. 1 The 
main reason for this strange limitation seems to have been 
that there were fierce but dormant rivalries in the House 
of Commons, and that an appointment of one of the 
aspirants would call uncontrollable passions into activity. 
Both Secretaries of State must therefore be peers, a prin- 
ciple which seems strange to a later generation. The King, 
therefore, nominated Lord Holdernesse, of whom the Prime 
Minister merely observes, 'I cannot possibly see him in 
the light of Secretary of State.' 2 Holdernesse however is 
appointed, and reappears more than once in this accidental 
character. 

But Pelham, though he tried to take this affair easily, 
was near the end of his patience. He was worn out by 
the perpetual exigencies and caprice of his brother and 
colleague, for Newcastle was in truth his partner in the 
Premiership, as well as by the explosive rivalries of Pitt 
and Fox, which any spark might ignite. Chained to an 
intolerable nincompoop, with two such subordinates ready 
to fly at each other's throats or his, and conscious of failing 
health, he began to long for liberty and repose. At the end 
of March, 1751, died the second Earl of Orford, and thus 
vacated the rich sinecure office of Auditor of the Exchequer, 
worth at least eight thousand a year. Pelham, it is said, 
intimated his wish to retire from active business with this 
noble provision, but the King would not let him go. 

1 Coxe's Pelham Adm. ii. 131, 370. 2 lb. ii. 396. 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 



CHAPTER XIII 

ON the meeting of Parliament in January, 1751, Lord 
Egmont raised on the Address the question of the 
peace with Spain. Pitt in reply delivered a speech of singular 
interest, for he disarms criticism by frankly avowing the 
errors of his 'young and sanguine' days, to employ his own 
epithets. After pointing out that the Spaniards could not 
be expected to give up the assertion of their right of search 
any more than we would renounce our claim to the right of 
free navigation in the American seas, he proceeded : ' I must 
therefore conclude, Sir, that "no search" is a stipulation 
which it is ridiculous to insist on, because it is impossible to 
be obtained. And after having said this I expect to be told 
that upon a former occasion I concurred heartily in a motion 
for an address not to admit of any treaty of peace with Spain 
unless such a stipulation as this should be first obtained as a 
preliminary thereto. I confess I did, Sir, because I then 
thought it right, but I was then very young and sanguine. 
I am now ten years older, and have had time to consider 
things more coolly. From that consideration I am convinced 
that we may as well ask for a free and open trade with all 
the Spanish settlements in America, as ask that none of 
our ships shall be visited or stopt, though sailing within a 
bowshot of their shore; and within that distance our ships 
must often sail in order to have the benefit of what they 
call the land breeze.' 'I am also convinced that all ad- 
dresses from this House during the course of a war, for 
prescribing terms of peace are, in themselves ridiculous; 

259 



LORD CHATHAM 

because the turns or chances of war are generally so sudden 
and often so little expected that it is impossible to foresee 
or foretell what terms of peace it may be proper to insist on. 
And as the Crown has the sole power of making peace or war, 
every such address must certainly be an encroachment upon 
the King's prerogative, which has always hitherto proved 
to be unlucky. For these reasons I believe I should never 
hereafter concur in any such address, unless made so con- 
ditional as to leave the Crown at full liberty to agree to such 
terms of peace as may at the time be thought most proper, 
which this of "no search" can never be, unless Spain should 
be brought so low as to give us a carte blanche; and such a 
low ebb it is not our interest to bring that nation to, nor 
would the other Powers of Europe suffer it, should we 
attempt it.' 1 

This is a new milestone. 'Those who endeavour to 
quote from my former speeches, the outpourings of my 
hot and fractious youth, are hereby warned off. I have 
sown my wild oats ; henceforward I am to be regarded as a 
prudent and sagacious statesman.' This was the real pur- 
port of this speech, divested of the necessary circumlocu- 
tions. A statesman who has been an active politician in his 
youth usually has to utter some such warning and re- 
pentant note in his maturity. 

In 1 75 1 we find Pitt delivering another speech which 
marks a further distance from his unregenerate days. At 
this time, for reasons which we can now scarcely discern, but 
which originated with George II., who considered that the 
peace and safety of his electorate depended on a secure suc- 
cession to the Empire being vested in the House of Austria, 
our foreign policy was concentrated on securing the election 
of Maria Theresa's son, a boy of ten years old, as King of the 
Romans, and so heir to the Empire. This strange line of 

1 Pari. Hist. xiv. 80 1. 
260 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

action was absurd enough to be congenial to Newcastle, 
who soon adopted it, called it his darling child, and grudged 
its paternity to the King. 1 Pelham had reluctantly to 
follow, only deprecating expenditure as far as possible. 
For this we slaved and negotiated and subsidised, in the 
faith that should the Emperor die without a King of the 
Romans being ready to succeed him, a war must infallibly 
ensue. This hypothesis was at least doubtful; but, in any 
case, we expended our energies in vain. Prussia, and 
France as guarantor of the Treaty of Westphalia, declared 
the election of a minor to be contrary to the fundamental 
laws of the Empire, and prevailed. There is the less reason 
to deplore our failure, as it is not known what we should 
have gained by success. Austria, which was alone to profit, 
threw the coldest water on the project. The obvious flaw 
of the policy appears to have been that the receipt of sub- 
sidies so entirely conflicted with the electoral oath as to form 
an insuperable bar of honour preventing any elector who 
received them from voting for our candidate. We were in 
fact to bribe those who could not vote if they accepted our 
bribe, for an object flagrantly illegal, on behalf of a Power 
which scouted our assistance. We offered to bribe the 
Electors of Mainz, Cologne, and Saxony. To the Elector 
of Bavaria we agreed by treaty to pay £40,000 a year, the 
sum to be made up by Holland and ourselves. It was this 
last treaty which Pitt found himself called upon to defend, 
and his speech was a broad defence of the whole system 
and principle of subsidies. 'Surely,' he cried, 'it is more Feb. 
prudent in us to grant subsidies to foreign princes for 
keeping up a number of troops for the service of the com- 
mon cause of Europe, than by keeping up such numerous 
armies of our own here at home, as might be of the most 
dangerous consequence to our constitution.' 2 This must 

1 Coxe's Pelham Adm. ii. 225, 359. z Pari. Hist. xiv. 967. 

18 261 



LORD CHATHAM 

have seemed strange doctrine to those who remembered 
his former harangues. But in this speech he was to exceed 
himself in superfluous candour. He had said that there 
was a good prospect of a firm and lasting peace, and then 
strangely wandered off to the consequent prospect of 
economy at home, 'perhaps by a different method of 
collecting the revenue. I am not afraid to mention the 
word Excise. 1 I was not in the House when the famous 
Excise scheme was brought upon the carpet. If I had 
I should probably have been induced by the general but 
groundless clamour, to have joined with those who opposed 
it. But I have seen so much of the deceit of popular 
clamours, and the artful surmises upon which they are 
founded, and I am so fully convinced of the benefits we 
should reap by preventing all sorts of unfair trade, that 
if ever any such scheme be again offered whilst I have a 
seat in this assembly, I believe I shall.be as heartily for it 
as I am for the motion now under our consideration.' 2 

It is scarcely possible to conceive a more deliberate 
and scornful repudiation of responsibility for any previous 
opinions that he may have maintained than is expressed in 
this passage. He goes out of his way to tender an un- 
necessary support to the detested Excise scheme, which 
at the same time he declares that he should certainly have 
opposed had he been in the House when it was introduced. 
The middle-aged Pitt seemed never to tire of trampling 
savagely on the young Pitt, even wantonly, as on this 
occasion. There is, indeed, more justice than is usual in 
Horace Walpole's taunts when he says of Pitt, ' Where he 
chiefly shone was in exposing his own conduct; having 
waded through the most notorious apostasy in politics, he 
treated it with an impudent confidence that made all re- 

1 Stone to Newcastle, Feb. 22, 1750-1. Add. MSS. 32724. 

2 Pari. Hist. xiv. 970. 

262 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

flections upon him poor and spiritless when worded by 
any other men.' This is one way of putting it. A pref- 
erable and, in our judgment, a truer way is that Pitt 
deliberately chose this method of public atonement for past 
recklessness, and as an avowal that he had learned and 
ripened by experience. He recanted at large, so as to ob- 
literate every vestige of his heedless and censorious youth. 
It is better for the country and for themselves that states- 
men should thus do penance than that they should continue 
to offer sacrifices of what they see to be right to the some- 
what egotistical pagod of their personal consistency . Honour- 
able consistency is necessary to retain the confidence of the 
country ; but there is also a dishonourable consistency in con- 
cealing and suppressing conscientious changes of judgment. 

Though, as we have seen, his defence of the principle of 
subsidies seemed unbounded, it was more limited in practice, 
and Pitt fixed his limit at the Bavarian contribution. In^ 
1752 Pelham had to move a subsidy to the Elector of 
Saxony, King of Poland. This had been negotiated by 
Newcastle, but was so strongly disapproved by Pelham that 
he even threatened to second the opposition to it. How- 
ever, he was persuaded by the argument most urgent and 
sometimes most fatal to prime ministers, that the apparent 
unity of the government must at any cost be maintained, 
to withdraw his opposition and move the vote. Old 
Horatio Walpole, though he voted with Pelham, spoke 
warmly against him, and Pitt supported Walpole 's argu- 
ment, though privately and not in speech. He felt, it may 
be presumed, that it was not for him to be more of a Pel- 
hamite than Pelham himself. 

With Pelham, however, he had felt constrained to be 
at open variance in the previous year, about the time 
of the Bavarian subsidy. The minister had moved a re- 
duction of our seamen from 10,000 to 8,000. Pitt de- 

263 



LORD CHATHAM 

clared a preference for 10,000; and Potter, whom we have 
seen in the Buckingham and Aylesbury affair, a clever, 
worthless fellow, who had now become an ally of Pitt, 
opposed the reduction. Pelham seemed to acquiesce, but 
Lord Hartington, an enthusiastic Pelhamite, who was here- 
after to be for a while Prime Minister under Pitt, forced a divi- 
sion, in order to show Pitt that the Whigs would not support 
him against Pelham. Pitt's immediate following on this occa- 
sion seems to have consisted only of Lyttelton, the three 
Grenvilles, Conway, and eight others. There was, it is to be 
observed, nothing factious in this; the opinion of Pitt was 
natural, and not distasteful to Pelham. Moreover, on the 
report Pitt made a conciliatory speech, marking in the 
strongest manner his regret at differing with Pelham, de- 
claring that it was his fear of Jacobitism alone which made 
him prefer the larger number, and expressing his concern at 
seeing our body of trained seamen, whom he called our 
standing army, reduced. He and his little following, or 
rather cousinhood, vied with each other in loyal eulogies 
of the Prime Minister. 

This called up Hampden, an intrepid buffoon, but the 
great-grandson of the patriot, and ' twenty -fourth hereditary 
lord of Great Hampden,' who attacked Pitt and his group 
with rancour. Here, again, we seem to discern traces of 
Buckinghamshire politics and jealousies. Temple and his 
belongings had, as we have seen, many enemies in their own 
county, and Hampden was one of them. Perhaps the 
Aylesbury affair still rankled. Pitt was visibly angered. 
Though Pelham warmly defended him, he was not appeased, 
and the affair would have ended in a duel had not the 
Speaker's authority intervened. In the succeeding year, 
it may be noted, the number of 10,000 was restored. 

Though these hostilities were averted, the" debate pro- 
duced further friction between the brethren who controlled 

264 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

the Ministry. Newcastle was profusely grateful to Pitt for 
the line he had taken. He wrote to one of his vassals 
(January 30th, 1 750-1) : 'As you can be no stranger (if you 
have attended the late debate) to the able and affectionate 
manner in which Mr. Pitt has taken upon himself to defend 
me, and the measures which have been solely carried on by 
me, when both have been openly attacked with violence, and 
when no other person opened his lips, in defence of either, 
but Mr. Pitt, I think myself bound in.honour and gratitude 
to show my sense of it in the best way I am able. I must 
therefore desire that neither you nor any of my friends 
would give into any clamour or row that may be made 
against him from any of the party on account of his differing 
as to the number of seamen. For after the kind part he has 
acted to me, and (as far as I am allowed to be part of it) the 
meritorious one to the administration, I cannot think any 
man my friend who shall join in any such clamour, and who 
does not do all in his power to discourage it. I desire you 
would read this letter to ' (here follow the names of seven 
forgotten men whom we may presume to have been his 
closest followers). 1 Pitt's attitude had alarmed Pelham, and 
this letter from the Duke, so formidable from parliamentary 
influence, made him sensible of imminent danger. He saw 
that he must either be reconciled to his brother or face that 
alarming coalition of Pitt and Newcastle which was after- 
wards effected with so much success. Once more there was 
a crisis, and Pelham's son-in-law Lincoln was called in as 
mediator. A treaty of peace of three articles was solemnly 
drawn up between the brothers, and apparent harmony 
restored. The King, however, broke out anew with em- 
phatic anger against Pitt and the Grenvilles. 

This was probably due to the rumour that Pitt and his 
connections were negotiating with the Prince of Wales. 

1 Coxe's Pelham Adm. ii. 144. 
265 



LORD CHATHAM 

This is not improbable. We know indeed that Lyttelton 
was arranging through his brother-in-law Dr. Ayscough 
for a coalition between the forces of Stowe and those of 
Leicester House. The King was old, and ambitious poli- 
ticians would not wish to be ill with his heir, if that could 
be avoided. But all such foresight was wasted, for Frederick 
was never to reign, and within two months of the vote on 
the seamen he was dead. Up to the last he was intriguing 
and securing adherents. On February 2 8th he was engaging 
Oswald, an able debater in the House of Commons, to his 
cause ; on March 20th he died. Next morning his party was 
convoked by Egmont to consider the future. Many came, 
probably from curiosity, but dispersed without any con- 
clusion. 'My Lord Drax,' writes Henry Fox in pleasant 
allusion to the promises of the Prince, 'my Lord Colebrook, 
Earl Dodington, and prime minister Egmont are dis- 
tracted ; but nobody more so than Lord Cobham, who cum 
suis has been making great court and with some effect all 
this winter. Do not name this from me. I fear they will 
not be dealt with as I would deal with them. ' 1 In truth the 
purpose and bond of the party, the sole reason for its exist- 
ence, had disappeared. Henceforth the courtiers who found 
no favour with the King kept their eyes on the Princess of 
Wales and her eldest son, a shy, sensitive boy, who was 
afterwards to be George III. Soon they began to perceive 
in this obscure court a handsome, supercilious Scotsman, 
who enjoyed the favour of the Princess and the veneration 
of her son, who was now a lord of the Prince's bedchamber, 
but was hereafter to head one ministry and become the 
bugbear of many others, John Earl of Bute. 

The Heir Apparent was only thirteen, and a Regency 
Bill was required. This is only pertinent to our narrative in 
that it produced a fierce parliamentary duel between Pitt 

1 Coxe's Pelham Adm. ii. 165. 
266 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

and Fox, the point at issue between them being the Duke 
of Cumberland, whom the King wished, but the Ministry- 
did not dare, to nominate Regent. Indeed, one of the 
principal expressions of popular grief for the loss of the 
Prince of Wales had taken the form of regret that the 
death had not been that of the Duke. ' Oh! that it was but 
his brother! Oh! that it was but the Butcher!' Unfor- 
tunately, the speeches of neither Pitt nor Fox in this 
session have come down to us. All that we know is that 
Pelham declared that Pitt's was the finest speech that ever 
he heard. Pitt had strongly maintained that the Regency 
must be closely restricted, the vital contention of his son 
thirty-seven years later, and hinted that Cumberland, if 
unrestrained in his capacity as head of the Council of 
Regency, might be tempted to usurp the Crown. Hence 
the wrath of Fox, the close friend of the royal Duke ; hence, 
too, the antipathy of Cumberland to Pitt, which was to cause 
complications thereafter. 

Pitt and his family connections, whose allegiance to the 
ministry had been under suspicion, and who had been in 
negotiation with the Prince's party, were rallied into ap- 
parent fidelity to the Ministry by the Prince's death, with- 
out, however, severing their renewed connection with 
Leicester House. But it was acquiescence rather than 
loyalty. Between the two ministerial orators in the House 
of Commons, Fox and Pitt, there had been cordial friend- 
ship. But it is evident that this had ceased. Fox, as we 
have seen, would have dealt with Pitt and the Grenvilles as 
traitors, and one would infer that it was the negotiation 
with the Prince of Wales which had angered him. The fact 
that Fox had sided with Pelham, and Pitt with Newcastle, 
had probably tended to division. Pitt, indeed, afterwards 
accused Pelham, poor soul, with having fostered their vari- 
ance. Then there had been the affair of the Regency. 

267 



LORD CHATHAM 

There had, too, just previously to the Prince's death, been 
a sharp altercation between them in a small debate raised 
by the petition for compensation of an ill-used gentleman 
in Minorca. This Pelham had refused; while Pitt up- 
held the claim with his wonted energy, but with unusual 
absurdity. He would support the petition of a man so 
oppressed and of so ancient a family to the last drop of 
his blood. Fox ridiculed this extravagance, and Pitt was 
nettled. This is only notable as a symptom of prevailing 
temper. 

But the facts of their personalities speak for themselves. 
They were rivals in Parliament, neither of them very scru- 
pulous, both fierce in debate. What need of further ex- 
planation? Fox, moreover, viewed Pitt's overtures to 
Leicester House with distrust, not merely from the point 
of view of a minister, but -from that of the Duke of Cumber- 
land, to whom he was devoted, and who detested the Prince 
of Wales and his crew. So that on the Regency Bill it 
was the wrath between the two factions which broke into 
open war. It was in the main the devotion of Fox to 
Cumberland which originally divided and then estranged 
hiinfrom Pitt. They were afterwards to reunite for a time 
by the mutual attraction of brains opposed to imbecility. 

This is perhaps the best opportunity to consider the 
character of this Henry Fox, who was now Pitt's rival. 
Strangely enough there is no real biography of this re- 
markable man, a vigorous and interesting figure, who has 
been to some extent obscured by his more popular and 
famous son. 

It would almost be enough to say that Fox was every- 
thing that Pitt was not. He had not that wayward but 
divine fire which we call genius, and which inspired Pitt; 
but he had the saving quality of common sense which 
was wanting to his rival. He laid no claim to the oratory 

268 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

of Pitt; he was, we are told, hesitating and inelegant, 
not indeed a good speaker; but he was plain and forcible, 
with a good business-like wear and tear style, which is 
in Parliament not less valuable than oratory ; on occasions 
indeed he spoke with a vehemence and closeness of reason- 
ing which almost anticipated the supreme faculty of his 
son. More than all, he thoroughly understood the House 
of Commons. He had the cordial manner, the veneer at 
least of good fellowship, the frankness savouring of cynicism, 
which make for an eminently serviceable sort of parlia- 
mentary popularity. In one respect, as a letter writer, he 
was greatly Pitt's superior. While Pitt was prancing 
fantastic minuets before his correspondents, Fox, without 
wasting a word, went straight to the point ; and his letters 
are pregnant, graphic, and forcible. There are perhaps 
none better in the English language than those in which 
he describes the debates of December 1755. He was, what 
Pitt was not, a genial companion, fond of the bottle and the 
chase ; he had, indeed, been a gambler and a debauchee. He 
was, what Pitt was not, a man of the world, and was closely 
allied with the choicest blood of the aristocracy by a mar- 
riage with a daughter of the Duke of Richmond. Pitt was a 
county gentleman, who had indeed married Temple's sister, 
but had thus entered a more limited and less exalted con- 
nection. They both had courage, but Fox minded the 
rebuffs of debate much less than Pitt. He was passionate, 
but with a passion less sublime than Pitt's. Pitt could 
sometimes feign passion; Fox could sometimes repress it. 
In later life, when it had been long smouldering, it was 
ungovernable. But at this time it only displayed itself 
in a not ungenerous resentment. In the race for success 
it would perhaps have been safer to back Fox than Pitt. 

But Fox had one incurable flaw which was wholly 
wanting in Pitt: his aims were base and material. He 

269 



LORD CHATHAM 

was content for long years to be Paymaster, amassing a 
huge fortune from all the emoluments, legitimate and semi- 
legitimate, of that lucrative office, when a noble ambition 
would not have stooped to so gross an obscurity. And 
besides money he had another weakness. He longed to 
be a lord. In the moment of his rival's triumph and his 
own fall we find him writing to Lady Yarmouth soliciting 
a peerage in almost abject terms. 1 That was refused, and 
it was only after long years of unabashed solicitation that 
he obtained his object. At last a peerage was accorded to 
his wife, as if to mark the reluctance felt to giving it to 
himself. Then his chance came. Bute had to find a bold 
and unscrupulous agent to carry the Peace through the 
House, and Fox was his man. Not merely had Fox to earn 
his peerage, but to wreak some vengeances. 2 He accepted 
the task readily, and had as his first reward the joy of 
removing Newcastle from the lieutenancy of three counties. 
And then, as if animated by a hatred of the whole human 
race, he expelled from their posts all, from the highest to the 
humblest, whom he suspected of opposition. It was a 
reign of terror, and by terror he accomplished the work he 
had been hired to do. Then he claimed his reward. He 
had earned and he received his peerage. But he had also 
earned and received a detestation, rarely accorded in 
England to a statesman, which lasted for the rest of his life, 
and which finds vent in the bitter lampoon which Gray, 
the gentlest of scholars, was moved to write. 

Later again, in his opulent seclusion, Fox was fired 
with a new ambition to become an earl. 3 He feared no 
extremity, no humiliation, to obtain his cherished object. 
But he failed. He was no longer worth buying; he could 
not, indeed, be employed. So in bitterness of spirit he 

1 Holland House MSS. 2 Colebrooke's Memoirs, i. 63. 

3 Earl of Rochester. lb. 73. 

270 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

passed away, cheered only by his delightful devotion to his 
wife and children, and by the goodwill of a few staunch 

friends. 

There is something profoundly melancholy in Fox's 
degeneracy. Its commencement is clearly marked. In 
1756 he was an easy companion, a good friend, kindly 
and beloved; he was honoured and admired; he was the 
second man in the House of Commons, willing and able 
to dare all. But when he was discarded, and had subsided 
into the Paymastership, he seems to have suffered a gradual 
deterioration. His objects became sordid; he lost the 
finer elements of his character; his ambition sank into 
something composed of vindictiveness and greed; his 
generous wine became corked and bitter. But at the time 
we are writing of, he was still amiable, still courageous, still 
warm with some instinct of honour, patriotism, and high 
emulation, still an able and masculine figure. It is perhaps 
unfair to anticipate a decline which is outside our limits. 
But the change is so remarkable, throwing, as it were, a 
back light on some of the puzzling aspects of Fox's earlier 
career, that it cannot well be unnoticed. 

More ominous of Pitt's attitude to the ministry than 
any small incidents of debate was Pitt's silence. For 
three successive sessions of Parliament, in 1752, 1753, and 
in that which closed in April, 1754, he practically held his 
peace. Nothing could be more sinister, nothing could 
mark more emphatically his discontent. Sickness, it ap- 
pears, accounted in part for this abstinence from the arena. 
'After a year of sullen illness,' as Horace Walpole describes 
it, he intervened in 1753 ; and this was followed by another 
twelve months of silence and of illness not less sullen. 
The intervention of 1753 was not very happy. By an Act 
passed in June, 1753, foreign Jews had been rendered capable 
of naturalisation. The Bill had passed into law without 

271 



LORD CHATHAM 

serious opposition, but soon aroused great popular clamour. 
Grub Street, as usual, was called into requisition. 

But Lord! how surprised when they heard of the news 
That we were to be servants to circumcised Jews, 
To be negroes and slaves instead of True Blues, 

Which nobody can deny. 

Newcastle was charged with having been bribed. 

That money you know is a principal thing, 

It will pay a Duke's mortgage or interest bring. 1 

On the meeting of Parliament in November of the same 
year Newcastle at once moved to repeal it. It had only 
been, he said in his silly jargon, a 'point of political policy,' 
and as it had aroused agitation in the public it had better 
be repealed. Foote recalled this slipshod phrase in his 
comical portrait of the Duke. 'The honour,' says Matthew 
Mug, ' I this day solicit will be to me the most honourable 
honour that can be conferred.' Pitt supported the repeal 
in a speech on which his admirers would not desire to dwelL 
Nov. 7, 1753 He was still in favour of the Act, but should vote for its re- 
peal, because the people wished it, having been misled by the 
'old High Church persecuting spirit' into believing that 
religion was concerned in the matter, which was not the fact, 
therefore an explanatory preamble was necessary. ' In the 
present case we ought to treat the people as a prudent father 
would treat his child ; if a peevish, perverse boy should in- 
sist on something that was not quite right but of such a 
nature as, when granted, could not be attended with any 
very bad consequence, an indulgent father would comply 
with the humour of his child, but at the same time he would 
let him know that he did so merely out of complaisance, and 
no't because he approved of what the child insisted on.' 2 

1 Wilkins, Political Ballads, ii. 312. 2 Pari. Hist. xv. 154. 

272 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

Whether this would or would not be the wisest course of 
parental discipline it is not necessary to discuss, but it was 
in the spirit of the practice that prevailed in the Fox family 
rather than in that of the Pitts. The repeal was passed 
with the preamble of admonition. 

This reluctant, ironical support was all that Pitt gave 
his colleagues. It cannot indeed be doubted that through- 
out these three lean years of silence he was hostile to the 
ministry. Promises had probably been made on his first 
accession to office which he thought had been ill -kept. He 
had been told, no doubt, that every effort would be made to 
make him more acceptable to the King, and he might well 
doubt if there had been much strenuous effort in that 
direction. And indeed a topic so sure to excite the royal 
spleen was not likely to be raised except under the pressure 
of absolute necessity. At any rate there had been no result. 
'The Pitts and Lytteltons are grown very mutinous on the 
Newcastle's not choosing Pitt for his colleague,' writes Hor- 
ace Walpole six weeks after the Prince's death. For Bed- 
ford was known to be doomed by Newcastle, and his Secre- 
taryship of State would soon be vacant. There were many 
aspirants for the succession, but no whisper of Pitt. Cob- 
ham, who had been his main supporter, was dead ; * no one 
could speak with so much authority on his behalf ; and even 
had Cobham survived he would probably have been silent. 

Soon after the letter from Walpole which we have quoted 
(June, 1 7 5 1 ) Bedford had resigned. He had been succeeded 
by Holdernesse. At the same time Granville, the object of 
Pitt's inveterate philippics, was admitted to the Cabinet as 
President of the Council. These events may well have 
inflamed Pitt's resentment, which had, we cannot doubt, 
been long smouldering. The great obstacle to his advance- 
ment was the King, who, as he knew, had always detested 

1 September, 1749. 
273 



LORD CHATHAM 

him. It was with the greatest difficulty that the Pelhams 
could persuade the Sovereign not altogether to ignore him 
at the Levees. Could he indeed trust the brothers? He 
appreciated no doubt Pelham's qualities at the Treasury, 
in council, and in the House of Commons. It seems im- 
possible to believe that Pitt ever can have trusted New- 
castle; though he addresses the Duke in his letters with 
an affected flummery of devotion. Almon, who is not a 
trustworthy authority, but who is supported in this in- 
stance by a probability which we may well deem irresist- 
ible, says that in at least one interview in the year 1752 he 
treated Newcastle with such scorn that Newcastle had he 
dared would have dismissed him from office. 1 Pitt had open- 
ly scoffed at the King of the Romans policy, Newcastle's 
cherished plan, and told the Duke that he was engaging in 
subsidies without knowing the amount, and in alliances with- 
out knowing the terms. Why, indeed, should Pitt trust New- 
castle whom no one had ever trusted, and whom Pitt must 
have measured and known to the very marrow of his bones ? 
We may take it as certain then that Pitt viewed the 
Duke with contemptuous penetration, and tolerated his 
grimaces and professions only till such time as he could 
put them to the test. Meanwhile there was a free trade 
in blandishments between them. Newcastle would send 
venison from Holland, and carp and fruit, and Pitt would 
abound in gratitude. 2 He still thought well to profess 
friendship, but, we may be sure, a wary friendship, for 
the veteran in the florid and artificial style of the day; 
on the very day of Pelham's death he wrote from Bath 
to assure him of 'unalterable attachment'; 3 and he con- 
descended to solicit a parliamentary seat from him. 

1 Almon, i. 195. 

2 Pitt to Newcastle, July 25, 1753. Add. MSS. 32732. 
8 Pitt to Newcastle, March 6, 1754. Add. MSS. 32734. 

274 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

But words cost little, and Pitt did not disdain profusion 
in them any more than in what cost more. In a letter to 
Lyttelton written immediately after Pelham's death, when 
he recommended an attitude of armed and hostile vigilance 
towards the new powers, he says: 'Professions of personal 
regard cannot be made too strongly,' and this line of con- 
duct explains his professions to Newcastle. For how could 
he fail under existing circumstances to be suspicious ? Had 
Newcastle lifted a finger to procure him the succession to 
Bedford? Yet no one could compete in Parliamentary 
authority with Pitt; and, though Murray's claims to ora- 
torical pre-eminence might vie with his, Murray's aspirations 
were confined to the law. At this time, Chesterfield, the 
best living judge of such matters, was writing to his son, 
and expressing therefore his real convictions : ' Mr. Pitt and 
Mr. Murray are beyond comparison .... the best orators. 
They alone can inflame or quiet the House; they alone 
are so attended to, in that numerous and noisy assembly, 
that you might hear a pin fall while either was speaking.' 1 
It is true that Chesterfield depreciates Pitt's matter. But 
the fact remains that he mentions Pitt as one of the two 
supreme masters of the House of Commons, the other, 
indeed, not having much heart in politics. The ignoring, 
the slighting of this great power, could not be forgiven by so 
aspiring a nature as Pitt's. He brooded and watched. 

1 Feb. ii. o.s. 1751. Letters, ii. 97. 



LORD CHATHAM 



CHAPTER XIV 

HOW did he pass these three years ? It is not easy to 
say, for we have so little light on' his private life. 
No prescient Boswell marked his words and habits, or in- 
deed had much opportunity of doing so. Few men of the 
same eminence have lived in such retirement as he did; 
we only catch glimpses. In the first place, it may be 
said without extravagance that his principal occupation 
was the gout. His gout became part of the history of 
England. To him it was a cruel fact. It kept him con- 
stantly disabled, and constantly away from London, ever 
trying new waters, principally the historical springs of 
Bath. Bath, indeed, was his second home. He seems to 
be almost always there till his marriage, and very frequent- 
ly afterwards. Half his letters seem to be dated thence. 
At last he definitely recognised it as a home by building a 
house there in the Circus, which cost "him 1200/. 1 This 
was in 1753. But in 1763 he disposed of this particular 
house, probably under some financial stress. 2 Whether he 
thus established himself from love of the place or from 
love of his friend Ralph Allen, who was Fielding's Squire 
Airworthy and Bath's Man of Ross, or whether he had 
already an ambition to represent the City in Parliament, 
we cannot tell. His cousin, Lord Stanhope, soon joined 
him and bought the houses next to his. 3 As time went 
on, and Pitt's fame and seclusion increased, it became 

1 Climenson's Mrs. Montagu, ii. 51. Kielmansegge's Diary, 131. 

2 Median's Famous Houses of Bath, 112. 3 Meehan, 111. 

276 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

more and more a political centre. There men collected 
who were anxious to get a word with the statesman, or at 
least obtain news of his health, which at times became the 
problem and mystery of a crisis. 

But his own uneasy quest of health made him seek a 
variety of other resorts, Astrop Wells, at the spring of 
St. Rumbald, Tunbridge Wells, Sunninghill, and what not. 
He thus became a constant participator in the tepid di- 
versions of these sickly haunts. Gilbert West, a minor 
poet, whose mother was Cobham's sister, and who was one 
of Pitt's dearest and most intimate friends, accompanied 
him to Tunbridge Wells in May, 1753, and writes accounts 
thence of his life and condition. 1 They lived together at 
the Stone House, which perhaps may still be identified, 
and which was chosen as their residence for its absolute 
quiet. Actual gout he seems to have welcomed as a relief 
from other disorders. He was at one time unable to sleep 
without opiates. Insomnia produced its usual effects, deep 
dejection, nay, complete prostration. Like all sufferers 
under that supreme disability, he was ready to try any 
remedies; musk was one of these. When the open ap- 
pearance of gout relieved the sufferer of its more insidious 
effects, he began a course of mild dissipation. We find 
him giving a dinner at the New Vauxhall, enriched perhaps 
by the bounty of Newcastle, who was sending him choice 
dainties at this time; then a rural entertainment of tea in 
a tent, where he bade ' his French horn breathe music like 
the unseen genius of the wood'; 2 a diversion which seems 
all the more pastoral, when we remember that at the same 
moment Fox and Hardwicke, the Chancellor, were at each 
other's throats in St. Stephen's over the Marriage Act. 
He made excursions to view the fine parks and seats of 
the neighbourhood, to Penshurst, Buckhurst, and, we may 

1 Climenson. 2 Mrs. Montagu's Letters, iii. 235. 

19 277 



LORD CHATHAM 

presume, Eridge; we are told that he considered these 
expeditions as good for the mind as well as the body. Then 
when he got stronger he went further afield. ' I have made 
a tour,' he writes, 'of four or five days in Sussex, as far as 
Hastings; Battel Abbey is very fine, as to situation and 
lying of ground, together with a great command of water 
on one side, within an airing; Ashburnham Park most beau- 
tiful; Hurtmonceux (sic) very fine, curiously and dismally 
ugly. On the other side of Battel: Crowhurst, Colonel 
Pelham's, the sweetest thing in the world; more taste 
than anywhere, land and sea views exquisite. Beach of 
four or five miles to Hastings, enchanting Hastings, unique; 
Fairly Farm, Sir Whistler Webster's, just above it; perfect 
in its kind, cum multis aliis, &c. I long to be with you' 
(he is writing to John Pitt, his Dorsetshire kinsman), 
' kicking my heels upon your cliffs and looking like a shep- 
herd in Theocritus.' * For the sake of his mind, too, he 
attended 'Mr. King's lectures on philosophy, &c.,' when 
'Mr. Pitt, who is desirous of attaining some knowledge in 
this way, makes him explain things very precisely.' In 
August, we must note in passing, he begged Newcastle to 
give him an opportunity of an interview as the duke passed 
near Tunbridge on the way to Sussex. Even in this amiable 
note he allows his pique to be visible for a moment. He 
entirely agrees with the policy of the brothers, but ' What 
I think concerning publick affairs can import' nothing to 
any one but myself.' 2 On his recovery he went off on a 
round of country visits to Stowe, Hagley and Hayes; 
Hayes, then occupied by Mrs. Montagu, which was des- 
tined to be the shrine of his passionate affection. Stowe 
was a second home to him; there we have seen him play 
cricket, there he entered with zest into the sumptuous 

1 Memorials of Lord Gambier, 1.61. Cf. Mrs. Montagu's Letters, iii. 240. 

2 Pitt to Newcastle. Tunbridge, Aug. 14, 1753. Add. MSS. 32732. 

278 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

plans of landscape-gardening, and even advised on archi- 
tecture. His delight in Hagley, the seat of his friend 
Lyttelton, was scarcely less keen. ' My dear Billy, ' he writes 
to William Lyttelton, then travelling in Germany, ' I am 
going in a few days to follow your brother to Hagley, and 
with all the respect due to the oaks of Germany, I would 
not quit the Dryads of your father's woods for all the 
charms of Wesphalia. Io gia coi campi Elisi fortunato 
giardin dei Semidei, la vostra ombra gentil non cangerei. 
You see, the idea of the Germanick body and the heroes 
and demigods who compose it have made me very poetical.' * 
He had, we may note, when this letter was written (Au- 
gust, 1748), just returned from Tunbridge, and had greatly 
benefited by his stay there. What, we may ask in passing, 
has become of the efficacious nymphs of all these wells? 
Have they lost their virtue, or is it only the necessary faith 
which has disappeared? 

From Hagley, Pitt would visit Shenstone at his petty 
paradise of the Leasowes, and the grateful poet would 
apostrophise him: 

'Ev'n Pitt, whose fervent periods roll 
Resistless o'er the kindling soul 
Of Senates, Councils, Kings; 
Tho' formed for Courts, vouchsafed to move 
Inglorious thro' the shepherd's grove, 
And ope his bashful springs.' 

But Pitt, debarred from the sports of the field, had always 
taken a lively interest in the laying out of land, in plant- 
ing, in landscape-gardening. He had, to use his own fe- 
licitous expression, 'the prophetic eye of taste.' At the 
Leasowes, at Hagley, at Radway, the Warwickshire seat 

1 Phillimore, 265. 
279 



LORD CHATHAM 

of Mr. Saunderson Miller, 1 at Wickham, the home of Gil- 
bert West, and at Chevening, the delightful residence of 
his friend and cousin Lord Stanhope, he freely exercised 
his gift. He utilised it still more freely and indeed ex- 
travagantly at his own homes, for in the pursuit of this 
hobby he disdained all limitations. Once, when Secretary 
of State, he was staying with a friend near London whose 
grounds he had undertaken to adorn and in the evening 
was summoned suddenly to London. He at once collected 
all the servants with lanterns, and sallied forth to plant 
stakes in the different places that he wished to mark for 
plantations. In later life he ran to still greater extremes. 
At Burton Pynsent a bleak hill bounded his views and 
offended his eye. He ordered it to be instantly planted 
with cedars and cypresses. 'Bless me, my Lord,' said the 
gardener, 'all the nurseries in the county would not fur- 
nish the hundredth part required.' 'No matter; send for 
them from London.' And from London they were sent 
down by land carriage, at a vast expense. These two 
familiar anecdotes cannot well be omitted. 

In the more moderate time with which we are dealing 
he was the chosen adviser of his friends, who may well have 
been guilty of the innocent flattery of seeking his advice 
with regard to his favourite hobby. His own home at this 
time was South Lodge in Enfield Chace, which is said to 
have been bequeathed to him together with £10,000, 'on 
this bequest that he should spend the money on improve- 
ments, and then grow tired of the place in three or four 
years.' 2 This seems dubious. But we are on safe ground 
in inferring from a letter of Legge's that he established 
himself there in 1748. Legge writes to him from Berlin 

1 An Eighteenth Century Correspondence, 388 n. See too Harris's Hard- 
wicke, ii. 456. 

2 Timbs, Anecdote Biography, 156, quoting from The Ambulator (1820). 

280 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

(July 10, 1748) : 'I congratulate myself and the rest of my 
unsound brethren upon the acquisition we have made by 
your admission into the respectable corps of woodmen and 
sawyers. I consider your Lodge as an accession to the 
common Stock and Republick of Sportsmen, which from 
its situation will bring peculiar advantages along with it, 
and that the woodcocks and snipes of Enfield may be 
visited at seasons of the year when those of Hampshire will 
not be so accessible. ... As to the joiners and bricklayers, 
possibly too the planters of trees and levellers of walks by 
whom you are surrounded, don't give yourself any con- 
cern about them. They are a sort of satellites which I beg 
leave to assure you attend a man gratis. Nay, I have been 
told by one whose opinion I rate highly, that these men's 
works all execute themselves with a certain overplus of 
profit to the person who is so happy as to employ them,' x 
and he adds in a postscript a list of shrubs or trees which 
he recommends. Legge's playful sarcasms as to expense 
did not deter his friend. 

By 1752 Pitt had converted South Lodge, in the opin- 
ion of his friends or flatterers, into a delightful pleasance. 
He had, in the fashion of those days, constructed a Temple 
of Pan with appropriate surroundings, which excited the 
admiration of critics, and is mentioned with special admira- 
tion, we are told, 'by Mr. Whately, a forgotten expert, in 
his " Observations on Modern Gardening," as one of the 
happiest efforts of well-directed and appropriate decora- 
tion.' The famous blue-stocking, Mrs. Montagu, writes of 
the 'shady oaks and beautiful verdure of South Lodge.' 
'There can,' she says in another letter, 'hardly be a finer 
entertainment not only to the eyes, but to the mind, than 
so sweet and peaceful a scene.' Yet Pitt assured her that 
he had never spent an entire week there. Gilbert West 

1 Legge to Pitt. Berlin, July 10, 1748. Chatham MSS. 
281 



LORD CHATHAM 

paid a visit there, when suffering presumably under an 
attack of the gout. ' He had provided for me a wheeling- 
chair, by the help of which I was enabled to visit every 
sequestered nook, dingle, and bosky bower from side to 
side in that little paradise opened in the wild.' 1 So that 
the garden would seem to have really been a success. 

But Pitt was to prove fickle to all these charms. On 
leaving Tunbridge Wells after the completion of his course 
of waters, he intended, besides long visits to Stowe and 
Hagley, to pay a passing visit to Hayes, a place near 
Bromley, of which his friend, Mrs. Montagu, had a lease. 
Whether it was a case of love at first sight or not, we do 
not know, but Hayes was destined to be the home of his 
affections and the place most closely identified with him- 
self. At the termination of Mrs. Montagu's lease in 1756, 
he bought it of the Harrison family, who owned it, and 
a letter from him is dated thence in May, 1756. But in 
January, 1765, he inherited the Burton Pynsent estate, 
and so, in the following October, he offered the Hayes 
property to his friend, the Hon. Thomas Walpole, at a 
fair valuation, indeed at cost price. He had wasted on it, 
we are told, prodigious sums, with little to show for it, for 
he had spent much in purchasing contiguous houses to free 
himself from neighbours. 'Much had gone in doing and 
undoing, and not a little portion in planting by torchlight, 
as his peremptory and imperious temper could brook no 
delay.' He had, moreover, Wallenstein's morbid horror of 
the slightest sound. Though he doted on his children, he 
could not bear them under the same roof ; they were placed 
in a separate building communicating with the main struc- 
ture by a winding passage. Vast sums were thus expended 
without adding to the value of the property. But now he 
was eager to leave the cherished home which had swallowed 

1 Climenson, ii. 9-10. Mrs. Montagu's Letters, iii. 181. 
282 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

so much of his fortune, and to hurry to the new scene. 
His intention of retiring into Somersetshire seems to have 
caused some alarm among his friends, who feared that it 
betokened retirement from public life; but with little rea- 
son, for it was in June, 1766, that the sale of Hayes to Mr. 
Walpole was completed, and in the succeeding month Pitt was 
First Minister. His accession to power was, however, ac- 
companied by a combined attack of all his maladies, nerv- 
ous and physical; and his morbid, violent cravings had, if 
possible, to be indulged. The most imperious of these 
was for Hayes, and he persuaded himself that its air was 
necessary to his recovery. He negotiated through Cam- 
den with Walpole, who unfortunately, in his year of 
residence, had become passionately attached to the place. 
But Pitt had become frantic. Hayes could not be men- 
tioned before him for fear of causing immoderate excite- 
ment. 'Did he' (Pitt) 'mention Hayes?' Camden asked 
James Grenville, who had just visited his illustrious brother- 
in-law. 'Yes; and then his discourse grew very ferocious.' 
Lady Chatham wrote imploring and pathetic letters to 
Walpole, who was ready to lend indefinitely, but not to 
sell. It would save her husband and her children; her 
children's children would pray for him. Meanwhile, even 
if Walpole consented, they had no money to buy with. 
They determined to sell part of the Pynsent inheritance. 
But that would only suffice to pay other debts, and Hayes 
would have to be mortgaged as well. Nothing could better 
prove the insane violence of Pitt's desire. At last, in 
October, 1767, Walpole yielded to Pitt's importunity, and 
in December the great man found himself once more at 
home. Camden declared of Walpole that 'the applause 
of the world and his own conscience will be his reward,' 
but it is not altogether pleasant to find that he did not 
disdain much more material compensations. Pitt had sold 

283 



LORD CHATHAM 

the house and grounds in June, 1766, for 11,780/., and had 
to buy them back in November, 1767, for 17,400/., a dif- 
ference of 5628/., so that he had to pay a smart fine for his 
caprices. The whole purchase came to 24,532/., but this 
includes other items, and lands which had been added by 
Walpole. 1 In 1772 he appears again to have contem- 
plated selling Hayes, 2 but he was destined to die there. 
All this is anticipation, but follows naturally on the topic 
of Pitt's country life. 

1 Nuthall to Lady Chatham, March 25, 1768. Chatham MSS. 

2 Chatham to Nuthall, Oct. 7, 1772. Chatham MSS. 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 



CHAPTER XV 

WE have seen that Pitt was to proceed to Hagley after 
leaving Tunbridge Wells in September, 1753. From 
Hagley he sent a letter to Newcastle, which it must have 
cost him something to write. 'Some circumstances of my 
brother's transactions at Old Sarum render me uneasy 
at depending for my seat in next Parliament on that place. 
So I take the liberty to recur once more for your Grace's 
protection and friendship to provide for my election else- 
where.' * Newcastle seems at once to have offered his 
borough of Aldborough, and Pitt 'can never express him- 
self sufficiently grateful for all your favours. ' 2 From Hag- 
ley (October 1753) he proceeded to Bath for a fresh course, 
and seems to have remained there a helpless cripple for no 
less than seven months, though he was in London for a 
debate in November. Never was illness so untimely, as 
events of vital importance to him were about to take 
place. For on March 6, 1754, Pelham died, and all was 
confusion. 'Now I shall have no more peace,' said the 
shrewd old King. ' I never saw the King under such deep 
concern since the Queen's death,' wrote Hardwicke. And 
indeed the situation was full of alarming possibilities. For 
Pelham had become the unobtrusive but indispensable 
man, like the mediocre and forgotten Liverpool, who kept 
the balance between fierce rivalries and discordant opinions 
for fifteen years. 

1 October 6, 1753. Add. MSS. 32733. 

2 October 13, 1753. Add. MSS. 32733. 

285 



LORD CHATHAM 

There seems no great complication in Pelham's char- 
acter. He was a Whig politician, trained under Walpole, 
but also under an intolerable brother who exercised the 
utmost prerogative of his birthright. His portrait, by 
Hoare, indicates something catlike, and he had much of 
feline caution and timidity. But among the politicians of 
that day he seems to have been comparatively simple and 
direct; and no man of his day was so fit for the position 
of Prime Minister in view of his own qualifications, and the 
conditions of the office at that time. He was indeed an 
inferior Walpole. He seems moreover to have been almost 
devoid of personal ambition; the highest places were 
thrust on him without his seeking them. At the fall of 
Walpole, in spite of Walpole's urgent instances that he 
should accept the Chancellorship of the Exchequer, which 
besides the eminence of the office would have given him 
the succession to Lord Wilmington, he insisted on remain- 
ing Paymaster, a post which, as we have seen, even without 
the recognised perquisites, had great material attractions, 
and which with them was capable of enchaining so power- 
ful a parliamentarian as Fox. On the death of Wilming- 
ton, by Walpole's influence, he obtained the highest place; 
though Walpole had not merely to inspire the King, but 
to overcome Pelham's reluctance. We may imagine that 
Walpole would urge on his Sovereign that Pelham was the 
only House of Commons man available, that he was emi- 
nently safe, that he represented Newcastle's parliamentary 
influence, and that Newcastle represented Hardwicke, who 
embodied the brains of the Cabinet; for those of Carteret 
were too dangerous to trust. 

As First Minister Pelham had many difficulties to con- 
tend with, but not greater than those which always must 
encompass that position. There was the King, with vio- 
lent prejudices and a Hanoverian policy, neither of which 

286 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

he shared. Then there was his brother, who regarded him- 
self as at least his junior's equal, and whose petulance, 
jealousy, and suspicion had to be kept in a constant state 
of arduous appeasement. Thirdly, there was Pitt, whom 
the King could not do with and Pelham could not do 
without; an element of incalculable explosion which any- 
thing might ignite. 

He seems to have steered his course somewhat passively 
through these complications; content so long as he could 
ward off domestic catastrophe, and prevent war with its 
consequent expenditure; though the fates in neither case 
were propitious. His only real conviction indeed was for 
peace and economy; for the heritage of Walpole's policy 
had devolved upon him, without Walpole's character and 
ability. Three years before the end, as we have seen, he 
had sickened of his task and of his helplessness amid the 
jarring elements of discord, but he had not been permitted 
to retire. He was indeed the necessary man; a good de- 
bater, a good administrator, a minister with a conscience 
for the public, a leader or a figurehead with Newcastle's 
parliamentary power behind him, a tactician who man- 
aged to keep Pitt at bay, dangerous but muzzled. Men 
of this stamp are kept in harness to the end. 

He died on March 6th, and the news found Pitt, on 
March 7th, crippled and immovable at Bath. His feet 
were impotent with gout, but his brain and hands were 
evidently unaffected. He at once dispatched a brief note 
of condolence to Newcastle, 'whose grief must be inconsol- 
able as its cause is irreparable. You have a great occasion 
for all your strength of mind to exert itself. Exercise it for 
the sake of your master and your country, and may all 
good men support you. I have the gout in both feet and 
am totally unable to travel.' * To Lyttelton and the Gren- 

1 Pitt to Newcastle, March 7, 1754. Add. MSS. 32734. 
287 



LORD CHATHAM 

villes he wrote on the same day at length 'the breaking of 
first thoughts to be confined to you four/ 1 enclosed in a 
covering letter to Temple, saying that he was worn down 
with pain, and incapable of motion. But he was none the 
less vigilant with regard to the least ripple on the surface 
of politics, 'I heard some time since that the Princess of 
Wales inquired after my health: an honour which I re- 
ceived with much pleasure, as not void, perhaps of some 
meaning.' 2 Newcastle at once answered Pitt's note of 
condolence, for we find Pitt acknowledging the reply on 
March 1 1 , and mentioning a letter written to him by Hard- 
wicke, under Newcastle's authority, 'with regard to some 
things in deliberation for the settling the Government in 
the House of Commons and the direction of the affairs of 
the Treasury. My answer is in a letter to Sir George 
Lyttelton.' 3 This was practically giving powers to Lyt- 
telton to negotiate with Newcastle as Pitt's represen- 
tative; a strange choice, when we read in the covering 
letter to Temple : ' let me recommend to my dear Lord 
to preach prudence and reserve to our friend Sir George, 
and, if he can, inspire him with his own.' Lyttelton 
indeed was not destined ever to earn fame as a negotia- 
tor. 

And now it is necessary to give the principal passages 
of this letter to Lyttelton and the Cousinhood, which would 
have been a fuller and clearer manifesto had not all poli- 
ticians at that time felt a well-grounded apprehension that 
their letters would be opened and read before they were 
delivered. Fulness and clearness were therefore the last 
qualities aimed at in their epistolary style, and inquiring 
posterity rues the result. 

1 Grenville Papers, i. 109. 2 lb. i. rn. 

3 Pitt to Newcastle, March 11, 1754. Add. MSS. 32734. 

288 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

Mr. Pitt to Sir George Lyttelton and the 
Grenville brothers. 

March 7, 1754. 

My dearest Friends, — [Then follows pompous regrets for 
Pelham's 'utterly irreparable' loss.] I will offer to the considera- 
tion of my friends but two things: the object to be wished for, 
the public; and the means; which the object itself seems to sug- 
gest; for the pursuit of it, my own object for the public, is, to 
support the King in quiet as long as he may have to live ; and to 
strengthen the hands of the Princess of Wales, as much as may 
be, in order to maintain her power in the Government, in case 
of the misfortune of the King's demise. The means, as I said, 
suggest themselves : an union of all those in action who are really 
already united in their wishes as to the object: this might easily 
be effected, but it is my opinion, it will certainly not be done. 

As to the nomination of a Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr. 
Fox in point of party, seniority in the Corps, and I think ability 
for Treasury and House of Commons business stands, upon the 
whole, first of any. 

Doctor Lee if his health permits is Papabilis, and in some 
views very desirable. Te Quinte Catule, my dear George Gren- 
ville, would be my nomination. 

A fourth idea I will mention, which if practicable, and worth 
the person's while, might have great strength and efficiency for 
Government in it, and be perfectly adapted to the main future 
-contingent object, could it be tempered so as to reconcile the 
Whigs to it: I mean to secularise, if I may use the expression, 
the Solicitor-General, 1 and make him Chancellor of the Ex- 
chequer. I call this an idea only; but I think it not visionary, 
were it accompanied by proper temperaments. I write these 
thoughts for Lord Temple, his brothers' and Sir George Lyttelton' s 
consideration only, or rather as a communication of my first 
thoughts, upon an emergency that has too much importance and 
delicacy, as well as danger in it, to whoever delivers their opinion 
freely, to be imparted any farther. 

I am utterly unable to travel, nor can guess when I shall be 
able: this situation is most unfortunate. I am overpowered 

1 Murray. 
289 



LORD CHATHAM 

with gout, rather than relieved, but expect to be better for it. 
My dear friends over-rate infinitely the importance of my health, 
were it established: something I might weigh in such a scale as 
the present, but you, who have health to act, cannot fail to weigh 
much, if united in views. 

I will join you the first moment I am able, for letters cannot 
exchange one's thoughts upon matters so complicated, extensive 
and delicate. 

I don't a little wonder I have had no express from another 
quarter. 1 

I repeat again, that what I have said are the breakings of 
first thoughts, to be confined to you four; and the looseness, and 
want of form in them, to be, I trust, excused in consideration of 
the state of mind and body of 

Your ever most affectionate, W. Pitt. 

As nothing is so delicate and dangerous, as every word uttered 
upon the present unexplained state of things, I mean unexplained, 
as to the King's inclinations towards Mr. Fox, and his real desire 
to have his own act of Regency, as it is called, maintained in 
the hands of the Princess; too much caution, reserve, and silence 
cannot be observed towards any who come to fish or sound your 
dispositions, without authority to make direct propositions. If 
eyes are really turned towards any connection of men, as a 
resource against dangers apprehended, that set of men cannot, 
though willing, answer the expectation without countenance, 
and additional consideration and weight added to them, by 
marks of Royal favour, one of the connection put into the Cab- 
inet, and called to a real participation of councils and business. 
How our little connection has stood at all, under all depression 
and discountenance, or has an existence in the eyes of the public, 
I don't understand: that it should continue to do so, without an 
attribution of some new strength and consideration, arising from 
a real share in Government, I have difficulty to believe. 

I am, however, resolved to listen to no suggestions of certain 
feelings, however founded, but to go as straight as my poor 
judgment will direct me, to the sole object of public good. 

1 This seems an allusion either to Leicester House, or, less probably, to 
Newcastle. 

290 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

I don't think quitting of offices at all advisable, for public or 
private accounts : but as to answering any further purposes in 
the House of Commons, that must depend on the King's will 
and pleasure to enable us so to do. 1 

It will be observed that Pitt does not mention the 
Treasury; and he probably, though in his letter to Temple 
of the same date he speaks of the Duke's ' ability as Secre- 
tary of State,' took it for granted that Newcastle would 
succeed his brother; a proof of his perception. Yet Wal- 
pole tells us that it was to the astonishment of all men 
that Newcastle took the Treasury five days later. 

Next we may notice that he does not mention the Sec- 
retaryship of State to be vacated by Newcastle, which 
would seem to show that that office had long been destined 
by the cousinhood for himself. 

The postscript is extremely obscure, as it was probably 
intended to be. It seems to enjoin the greatest caution in 
dealing with any vague overtures which may be made, 
until it is known whether ~the King means to give his con- 
fidence to Fox, and whether he means to maintain the 
Regency as then established. But this phrase about the 
Regency is almost unintelligible. 

The last sentence in the postscript is the clearest of the 
letter. Let us remain in office, but whether we exert our- 
selves there or remain in sullen silence must depend on the 
attitude of the King. 

All this is enclosed in a covering letter to Temple — 

Mr. Pitt to Earl Temple. 

March 7, 1754. 

My dear Lord, — I return my answer to Jemmy's and Sir 
George's dispatch directed to you, and accompany it with this 
line to give you my apprehensions of Sir George's want of dis- 

1 Grenville Papers, i. 106. 
291 



LORD CHATHAM 

cretion and address, in such soundings as will be, and have been, 
made upon him, with regard to the disposition of his friends. 

I beg your Lordship will be so good to convene your brothers 
and Sir George, and communicate my letter to them which is 
addressed to you jointly. It is a most untoward circumstance 
that I cannot set out immediately to join you. I am extremely 
crippled and worn down with pain, which still continues. I 
make what efforts I can, and am carried out to breathe a little 
air. I write this hardly legible scrawl in my chaise. 

Let me recommend to my dear Lord to preach prudence 
and reserve to our friend Sir George, and if he can, to inspire 
him with his own. 

I heard some time since that the Princess inquired after my 
health; an honour which I received with much pleasure, as not 
void, perhaps, of some meaning. 

I have writ more to-day than my weak state, under such a 
shock, as the news of to-day, will well permit. 
Believe me, my dearest Lord, 

Ever most affectionately yours, 

W. Pitt. 

Fox will be Chancellor of the Exchequer, notwithstanding 
any reluctancy to yield to it in the Ministers; George Grenville 
may be offered Secretary at War; I am sure he ought to be so. 
I advise his acceptance. The Chancellor is the only resource; 
his wisdom, temper, and authority, joined to the Duke of New- 
castle's ability as Secretary of State, are the dependance for 
Government. The Duke of Newcastle alone is feeble, this not 
to Sir George. 1 

Pitt's next step was to send two letters, in the same 
cover, to Lyttelton; one a confidential letter, the other, 
an ostensible one, to be sent to Hardwicke. The con- 
fidential letter, which follows, is striking, and contains as 
much of Pitt's plan of operations at this crisis as any that 
we possess. 

1 Grenville Papers, i. no. 
292 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

Bath, March 10th, 1754. 

Dear Lyttelton, — I am much obliged to you for your dispatch, 
and am highly satisfied with the necessary reserve you have kept 
with respect to the dispositions of yourself and friends. Indeed, 
the conjuncture itself, and more especially our peculiar situation, 
require much caution and measure in all our answers, in order 
to act like honest men, who determine to adhere to the public 
great object; as well as men who would not be treated like chil- 
dren. I am far from meaning to recommend a sullen, dark, 
much less a double conduct. All I mean is to lay down a plan 
to ourselves; which is, to support the King's Government in 
present, and maintain the Princess's authority and power in a 
future, contingency. As a necessary consequence of this system, 
I wish to see as little power in Fox's hands as possible, because 
he is incompatible with the main part, and indeed of the whole, 
of this plan; but I mean not to open myself to whoever pleases 
to sound. my dispositions, with regard to persons especially, and 
by premature declarations deprive ourselves of the only chance 
we have of deriving any consideration to ourselves from the 
mutual fears and animosities of different factions in court: and 
expose ourselves to the resentment and malice in the closet of 
the one without stipulations or security for the good offices and 
weight of the other there in our favour. 

But do I mean, then, an absolute reserve, which has little 
less than the air of hostility towards our friends (such as they 
are) at Court, or at least, bear too plainly the indications of 
intending a third party or flying squadron? By no means. 
Nothing would, in my poor judgment, be so unfit and dangerous 
for us. I would be open and explicit (but only on proper occa- 
sions) 'that, I was most willing to support his Majesty's Gov- 
ernment upon such a proper plan as I doubted not his Majesty, 
by the advice of his Ministers, would frame; in order to supply, 
the best that may be, the irreparable loss the King has sustained 
in Mr. Pelham's death: in order to secure the King ease for his 
life and future security to his family and to the kingdom: that 
my regards to the ministers in being were too well known to need 
any declarations ' ; this and the like, which may be vary'd for 
ever, is answer enough to any sounder. As to any things said 
by Principals in personal conference, as that of the Chancellor 

20 2 93 



LORD CHATHAM 

with you, another manner of talking will be proper, though still 
conformable to the same private plan which you shall resolve 
to pursue. Professions of personal regard cannot be made too 
strongly; but as to matter, generals are to be answered with 
generals ; particulars, if you are led into them, need not at all be 
shunn'd; and if treated with common prudence and presence of 
mind, can not be greatly used to a man's prejudice; if he says 
nothing that implies specific engagements, without knowing 
specifically what he is to trust to reciprocally. Within these 
limitations, it seems to me, that a man whose intentions are clear 
and right, may talk without putting himself at another's mercy 
or offending him by a dark and mysterious reserve. 

I think it best to throw my answer to the Chancellor into a 
separate piece of paper, that you may send it to his lordship. 
I am sorry to be forced to answer in writing, because, not seeing 
the party, it is not possible to throw in necessary qualifications 
and additions or retractions, according to the impression things 
make. 

As far as, my dear Lyttelton, you are so good to relate your 
several conversations upon the present situation, I highly ap- 
plaud your prudence. I hope you neither have nor will drop a 
word of menace, and that you will always bear in mind that my 
personal connection with the Duke of Newcastle, has a peculiar 
circumstance, 1 which yours and that of your friends has not. 
One cannot be too explicit in conversing at this unhappy dis- 
tance on matters of this delicate and critical nature. I will, 
therefore, commit tautology, and repeat what I said in my former 
dispatch, viz., that it enters not the least into my plans to inti- 
mate quitting the King's service; giving trouble, if not satisfied, 
to Government. The essence of it exists in this: attachment to 
the King's service, and zeal for the ease and quiet of his life, and 
stability and strength to future government under the Princess; 
this declared openly and explicitly to the ministers. The reserve 
I would use should be with regard to listing in particular sub- 
divisions, and thereby not freeing persons from those fears which 
will alone quicken them to give us some consideration for their 
own sakes: but this is to be done negatively only, by eluding ex- 
plicit declarations with regard to persons especially; but by 

1 Pitt was member for Aldborough, one of Newcastle's boroughs. 

294 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

intimations of a possibility of our following our resentments; for, 
indeed, dear Sir George, I am determined not to go into faction. 
Upon the whole, the mutual fears in Court open to ■ our connexion 
some room for importance and weight, in the course of affairs : 
in order to profit by this situation, we must not be out of office : 
and the strongest argument of all to enforce that, is, that Fox 
is too odious to last for ever, and G. Grenville must be next 
nominated under any Government. 
I am too lame to move. 

Your ever affectionate, 

W. Pitt. 1 

Then follows the apparent and ostensible letter to be 
shown to the Chancellor. It is from the nature of it 
artificial and need not be quoted in full. But it contains 
one remarkable passage in which Pitt claims credit for 
having renounced opposition and the accompanying popu- 
larity when he was convinced that there might be danger 
to the reigning family from his carrying it further. The 
assertion is striking and daring, and no doubt Pitt did 
join the Government while Charles Edward was still in 
arms. 

Bath, March nth, 1754. 
My dear Sir George. — I beg you will be so good to assure my 
Lord Chancellor, in my name, of my most humble services and 
many very grateful acknowledgments for his Lordship's obliging 

wishes for my health I can never sufficiently express the 

high sense I have of the great honours of my Lord Chancellor's 
much too favourable opinion of his humble servant; but I am 
so truly and deeply conscious of so many of my wants in Parlia- 
ment and out of it, to supply in the smallest degree this irrepar- 
able loss, that I can say with much truth were my health restored 
and his Majesty brought from the dearth of subjects to hear of 
my name for so great a charge, I should wish to decline the 
honour, even though accompany' d with the attribution of all 

1 Phillimore's Lyttelton, 449. 
295 



LORD CHATHAM 

the weight and strength which the good opinion and confidence 
of the master cannot fail to add to a servant; but under im- 
pressions in the Royal mind towards me, the reverse of these, 
what must be the vanity which would attempt it ? These prej- 
udices, however so successfully suggested and hitherto so unsuc- 
cessfully attempted to be removed, shall not abate my zeal for 
his Majesty's service, though they have so effectually disarmed 
me of all means of being useful to it. I need not suggest to his 
Lordship that consideration and weight in the House of Commons 
arises generally but from one of two causes — the protection and 
countenance of the Crown, visibly manifested by marks of Royal 
favour at Court, or from weight in the country, sometimes aris- 
ing from opposition to the public measures. This latter sort of 
consideration it is a great satisfaction to me to reflect I parted 
with, as soon as I became convinced there might be danger to 
the family from pursuing opposition any further; and I need not 
say I have not had the honour to receive any of the former since 

I became the King's servant Perhaps some of my friends 

may not labour under all the prejudices that I do. I have 
reason to believe they do not: in that case should Mr. Fox be 
Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Secretary at War is to be filled 
up 1 

He does not follow up this innuendo, nor was it neces- 
sary. The next day he writes frankly to Temple, who 
seems to have been much in Pitt's confidence at this time. 
Taken in conjunction with the secret letter to Lyttelton of 
March 10, the plan of operations is easily understood. We 
will leave ministers 'under the impression of their own 
fears and resentments, the only friends we shall ever have 
at Court, but to say not a syllable which can scatter terrors 
or imply menaces.' Pitt's plan, in a sentence, was to hang 
over the Government like a thundercloud, dark, silent, 
menacing, possibly to be dispelled, but ready and in an 
instant to pour destruction down. 

1 Phillimore's Lyttelton, 453. 
296 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

Mr. Pitt to Earl Temple. 

Bath, March n, 1754. 

My dearest Lord, — I hope you will not disapprove my answer 
to Lord Chancellor. I include in you your brothers, for your 
Lordship's name is Legion. You will see the answer contains 
my whole poor plan; the essence of which is to talk modestly, 
to declare attachment to the King's government, and the future 
plan under the Princess, neither to intend nor intimate the quit- 
ting the service, to give no terrors by talking big, to make no 
declarations of thinking ourselves free by Mr. Pelham's death, 
to look out and fish in troubled waters, and perhaps help trouble 
them in order to fish the better: but to profess and to resolve 
bona fide to act like public men in a dangerous conjuncture for 
our country, and support Government when they will please to 
settle it; to let them see we shall do this from principles of public 
good, not as the bubbles of a few fair words, without effects (all 
this civilly), and to be collected by them, not expressed by us; 
to leave them under the impressions of their own fears and re- 
sentments, the only friends we shall ever have at Court, but to 
say not a syllable which can scatter terrors or imply menaces. 
Their fears will increase by what we avoid saying concerning 
persons (though what I think of Fox, etc., is much fixed), and 
by saying very explicitly, as I have (but civilly), that we have 
our eyes open to our situation at Court, and the foul play we have 
had offered us in the Closet: to wait the working of all these 
things in offices, the best we can have, but in offices. 

My judgment tells me, my dear Lord, that this simple plan 
steadily pursued will once again, before it be long, give some 
weight to a connection, long depressed, and yet still not annihi- 
lated. Mr. Fox's having called at my door early the morning 
Mr. Pelham died is, I suppose, no secret, and a lucky incident, 
in my opinion. I have a post letter from the Duke of Newcastle, 
a very obliging one. I heartily pity him, he suffers a great deal 
for his loss. 

Give me leave to recommend to your Lordship a little 
gathering of friends about you at dinners, without ostentation. 
Stanley, who will be in Parliament : some attention to Sir Richard 
Lyttelton I should think proper; a dinner to the Yorkes very 

297 



LORD CHATHAM 

seasonable; and, before things are settled, any of the Princess of 
Wales's Court. John Pitt not to be forgot : I know the Duke of 
B nibbles at him: in short liez commerce with as many- 
members of Parliament, who may be open to our purposes, as 
your Lordship can. Pardon, my dear Lord, all this freedom, 
but the conjuncture is made to awaken men, and there is room 
for action. I have no doubt George Grenville's turn must come. 
Fox is odious, and will have difficulty to stand in a future time. 
I mend a little. I cannot express my impatience to be with you. 

W. Pitt. 1 

On March 18, Lyttelton writes to Grenville to ask if 
he shall send an express down to Pitt as 'he will be im- 
patient to hear particulars,' with the news that Grenville 
and the writer had accepted office, and 'things are not as 
much settled as they are likely to be till the dissolution of 
parliament. I have had no answer from him to my last 
letter; have you?' But this unanswered letter may not 
have reached its destination, or was destitute of certain 
intelligence, for we find Pitt writing to Lyttelton on March 
20: 'I conclude that things still remain unsettled, be- 
cause I hear nothing from you or my other friends relat- 
ing to them.' So he is solacing himself by reading Boling- 
broke's works. Their arrogance, he says, is so excessive, 
that, great as is the performance, it often becomes ridicu- 
lous. There was, he remembers, not many years ago, a 
man in Bedlam, a scholar of fine parts, who used to enter- 
tain all the spectators of that asylum with very rational 
discourses, and talked with wit and eloquence; but always 
concluded by assuring his hearers that he alone of all his 
hearers was in his right senses, and they and all mankind 
were mad, and had conspired to put him in that place; 
Bolingbroke reminds Pitt of this lunatic. There was in- 
deed no love lost between the two men. Pitt had not 
treated the elder statesman with the deference paid to 

1 Grenville Papers, i. 112. 
298 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

him by the adoring circle in which he lived, and Boling- 
broke had then charged Pitt with the same fault which 
Pitt now found in Bolingbroke. On March 24, in a letter 
to Grenville, he pursues the same theme, and dubs Boling- 
broke the 'intellectual Sampson of Battersea.' But six 
weeks afterwards, we find him warmly recommending 
Bolingbroke's 'Remarks on the History of England' to 
his nephew ' to be studied and almost got by heart for the 
inimitable beauty of the style, as well as the matter.' 

And now comes a letter of which not a word must be 
omitted, the memorable letter to Newcastle of March 24, 
long supposed to be lost, but now discovered among the 
Newcastle Papers. It was penned under the just resent- 
ment caused by the knowledge of the arrangements for 
office from which he had been insultingly ignored. It is, 
so far as we know, the greatest that Pitt ever wrote, full 
of scornful humility, suppressed passion, and pointed in- 
sinuation. Unlike most of his letters it needs no inter- 
pretation, it speaks for itself. That bitterness of indigna- 
tion, which is said to produce poetry, has in this instance 
evolved clearness and force. Towards the end, after speak- 
ing of resignation, and of his wish for retirement, he utters 
this prophecy, baleful to Newcastle, who should have 
remembered that the prophet had it in his power to fulfil 
his own prediction. 'Indeed, my lord, the inside of the 
House must be consider'd in other respects besides merely 
numbers, or the reins of government will soon slip or be 
wrested out of any minister's hands.' A few months were 
to bring home to the duke the truth of this prediction. 

Pitt to Newcastle. 

Bath, 24 March, 1754. 
My Lord Duke, — I have heard with the highest satisfaction 
by a message from S r George Lyttelton the effectual proofs of 

299 



LORD CHATHAM 

his Majesty's great kindness and firm confidence in your Grace 
for the conduct of his Government. You have certainly taken 
most wisely the Province of the Treasury to yourself, where the 
powers of Government reside, and which at this particular crisis 
of a General Election may lay the foundations of the future 
political system so fast as not to be shaken hereafter. But this 
will depend upon many concomitant circumstances. For the 
present the nation may say with consolation, uno avulso non 
deficit alter aureus. The power of the Purse in the hands of the 
same family may, I trust, be so used as to fix all other power 
there along with it. Amidst all the real satisfaction I feel on 
this great measure so happily taken, it is with infinite reluctance 
that I am forced to return to the mortifying situation of your 
Grace's humblest servant and to add some few considerations 
to those, which, I have the satisfaction to learn from S r George 
Lyttelton, had the honour to be receiv'd by your Grace and my 
Lord Chancellor without disapprobation. The difficulties grow 
so fast upon me by the repetition and multiplication of most 
painfull and too visible humiliations that my small store of 
prudence suggests no longer to me any means of colouring them 
to the world; nor of repairing them to my own mind consistently 
with my unshaken purpose to do nothing on any provocation 
to disturb the quiet of the King and the ease and stability of 
present and future Government. 

Permit, my Lord, a man, whose affectionate attachment to 
your Grace, I believe, you don't doubt, to expose simply to your 
view of his situation, and then let me entreat your Grace (if you 
can divest your mind of the great disparity between us) to trans- 
port yourself for a moment into my place. From the time I had 
the honour to come into the King's service, I have never been 
wanting in my most zealous endeavours in Parliament on the 
points that laboured the most, those of military discipline and 
foreign affairs; nor have I differ'd on any whatever, but the too 
small number of seamen one year, which was admitted to be so 
the next ; and on a crying complaint against General Anstruther : 
for these crimes how am I punish'd? Be the want of subjects 
ever so great and the force of the conjuncture ever so cogent, be 
my best friends and protectors ever so much at the head of Gov- 
ernment, an indelible negative is fixed against my name. Since 

300 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

I had the honour to return that answer to the Chancellor which 
Your Grace and his Lordship were pleas'd not to disapprove, 
how have mortifications been multiply' d upon me. One Chan- 
cellor of the Exchequer over me was at that time destin'd, Mr. 
Fox: since that time a second, Mr. Legge, is fixt: a Secretary of 
State is next to be look'd for in the House of Commons; Mr. Fox 
is again put over me and destin'd to that office: he refuses the 
seals: Sir Thomas Robinson is immediately put over me and is 
now in possession of that great office. I sincerely think both 
these high employments much better fill'd than I cou'd supply 
either of them in many respects. Mr. Legge I truely and cor- 
dially esteem and love. Sir Thos. Robinson, with whom I have 
not the honour to live in the same intimacy, I sincerely believe 
to be a gentleman of much worth and ability. Nevertheless I 
will venture to appeal to your Grace's candour and justice whether 
upon such feeble pretensions as twenty years' use of Parliament 
may have given me, I have not some cause to feel (as I do most 
deeply) so many repeated and visible humiliations. I have 
troubled your Grace so long on this painfull subject that I may 
have nothing disagreeable to say, when I have the honour to 
wait on you; as well as that I think it fit your Grace shou'd know 
the whole heart of a faithfull servant, who is conscious of nothing 
towards your Grace which he wishes to conceal from you. In 
my degraded situation in parliament, an active part there I am 
sure your Grace is too equitable to desire me to take ; for otherwise 
than as an associate and in equal rank with those charg'd with 
Government there, I never can take such a part. 

I will confess I had flatter' d myself that the interests of your 
Grace's own power were so concern'd to bring forward an in- 
strument of your own raising in the House of Commons that you 
cou'd not let pass this decisive occasion without surmounting in 
the royal mind the unfavourable impressions I have the unhappi- 
ness to be under; and that the seals (at least when refus'd by Mr. 
Fox) might have been destin'd as soon as an opening cou'd be 
made in the King's mind in my favour instead of being imme- 
diately put into other hands. Things standing as they do, 
whether I can continue in office without losing myself in the 
opinion of the world is become a matter of very painfull doubt 
to me. If anything can colour with any air of decency such an 

301 



LORD CHATHAM 

acquiescence, it can only be the consideration given to my friends 
and some degree of softening obtain' d in his Majesty's mind 
towards me. Mr. Pelham destin'd Sir George Lyttelton to be 
cofferer, whenever that office shou'd open, and there can be no 
shadow of difficulty in Mr. Grenville being made Treasurer of 
the Navy. Weighed in the fair scale of usefulness to the King's 
business in Parliament, they can have no competitors that de- 
serve to stand in their way. I have submitted these things to 
your Grace with a frankness you had hitherto been so good to 
tolerate in me, however inferior. I wou'd not have done it so 
fully for my own regard alone, were I not certain that your Grace's 
interests are more concern'd in it than mine : because I am most 
sure that my mind carries me more strongly towards retreat than 
towards courts and business. Indeed, My Lord, the inside of 
the House must be consider' d in other respects besides merely 
numbers, or the reins of Government will soon slip or be wrested 
out of any minister's hands. If I have spoken too freely, I 
humbly beg your Grace's pardon : and entreat you to impute my 
freedom to the most sincere and unalterable attachment of a man 
who never will conceal his heart, and who can complain without 
alienation of mind and remonstrate without resentment. 
I have the honour to be, etc. etc. 

W. Pitt. 

I cannot hope to leave Bath in less than a week. My health 
seems much mended by my gout. 1 

This letter was enclosed to Lyttelton under flying seal 
to be communicated to the Grenvilles. Pitt, writing the 
same day to Temple, says: 'I hope my letter to the Duke 
of Newcastle will meet with the fraternal approbation. It 
is strong, but not hostile, and will, I believe, operate some 
effect. I am still more strongly fixed in my judgement 
that the place of importance is employment, in the present 
unsettled conjuncture. It may not to us be the place of 
dignity, but sure I am it is that of the former. I see, as 
your Lordship does, the treatment we have had: I feel it 

1 Add. MSS. 32734. f. 322. 
302 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

as deeply, but I believe, not so warmly. I don't suffer my 
feelings to warp the only plan I can form that has any 
tendency or meaning. For making ourselves felt, by dis- 
turbing Government, I think would prove hurtful to the 
public, not reputable to ourselves, and beneficial in the end, 
only to others. All Achilles as you are, Impiger, Iracundus, 
etc., what would avail us to sail back a few myrmidons 
to Thessaly! Go over to the Trojans, to be revenged, we 
none of us can bear the thought of. What then remains ? 
The conduct of the much-enduring man, who by temper, 
patience, and persevering prudence, became adversis rerum 
immersabilis undis.' 

He adds another postscript of caution : ' Be so good as 
not to leave my letters in your pockets, but lock them up 
or burn them, and caution Sir George to do the same.' ' 
Secrecy was of the essence of his scheme. Should New- 
castle or the Chancellor understand the part that he de- 
signed to play, they would have an advantage in the game. 

On April 2nd Pitt writes to jog Newcastle's memory in 
a note about the Aldborough election : ' I had expected to 
hear from you, but I know the multiplicity of your busi- 
ness.' 2 He need not have feared that his letter had been 
overlooked. So little was this the case that, no doubt 
after anxious and protracted conferences, Newcastle and 
Hardwicke were both writing to him on this very day long 
and elaborate apologies. Hardwicke 's is a document, as 
might be expected, of great but inadequate skill. 3 It gives 
him much concern to find that Pitt is ' under apprehensions 
of some neglect on this decisive occasion.' He is not alto- 
gether surprised. Could Pitt only have heard how warmly 
Hardwicke pressed his claims ! But there are certain things 

1 Grenville Papers, i. 116. 

2 Pitt to Newcastle, April 2, 1754. Add. MSS. 32735. The more elaborate 
draft of this letter is given with a wrong date in the Chatham Corr., i. 85. 

3 Chatham Corr., i. 89 

303 



LORD CHATHAM 

which ministers cannot do directly. These must be left 
to 'time and incidents and perhaps ill-judging opponents.' 
Fox's pressing for larger powers than the King would give 
had no doubt helped the cause of Pitt, and Newcastle's 
being at the head of the Government whose devotion to 
Pitt was so notorious would further it still more. He con- 
cludes by hoping with sincerity that Pitt would take an 
active part, though no doubt had he seen the direction in 
which his wish was fulfilled, he would have withdrawn it 
with greater emphasis. This stripped of verbiage seems 
the bone of this long letter. 

Behind Hardwicke shuffles Newcastle. 'Feel for me,' 
he plaintively exclaims, ' for my melancholy and distressed 
situation: compelled to leave the department of which I 
was a master to one with which I was entirely ignorant, 
exposed to envy and reproach, and sure of nothing but the 
comfort of an honest heart.' It had first been suggested 
that Fox should be Secretary of State to make Newcastle's 
elevation more palatable to his opponents. But 'that for 
certain reasons did not take place; upon which the King 
himself, of his own motion declared Sir Thomas Robinson 
Secretary of State.' And this Pitt's friends thought the 
best practicable arrangement. For though an excellent 
man for the office, Robinson had not Parliamentary talents 
which could excite jealousy, and as, from circumstances 
deeply lamented by Newcastle, ' it was impossible to put 
one into that office who had all the necessary qualifications 
both within and out of the House,' there seemed nothing 
better to do than to appoint the inoffensive Sir Thomas. 
All interspersed with copious assurances of love and affec- 
tion. ' I honour, esteem, and .... most sincerely love you.' 1 

Pitt replies to Newcastle in a letter which it is neces- 
sary to print in full from the original in the Newcastle 

1 Chatham Corr., i. 95. 
304 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

Papers, for this is very different from the draft printed in 
the Chatham Correspondence. 

Pitt to Newcastle. 

Bath, 4 Apr. 1754. 
My Lord Duke, — I was honour'd with your Grace's letter 
of ye 2nd inst. yesterday evening. How shall I find words to 
express my sense of the great condescension and kindness of 
expression with which it is writ? It would be making but an 
ill return to so much goodness, were I to go back far into the 
disagreeable subject that has occasion'd your Grace so much 
trouble, and wou'd be tearing and wounding your good nature 
to little purpose. Whatever my sensations are, it is sufficient 
that I have once freely laid them before you, and that your Grace 
has had the indulgence to pardon that freedom, which I thought 
I used both to your Grace and myself. As for the rest, my 
attachment shall be ever found as unalterable to Government 
as my inability to be of any material use to it is become manifest 
to all the world. I will enter again, but for a word or two, into 
a subject your Grace shall be troubled no more with. It is most 
obliging to suggest as consolations to me that I might have been 
much more mortify'd under another management than under 
the present: but I will freely own I shou'd have felt myself far 
less personally humiliated, had Mr. Fox been placed by the King's 
favour at the head of the House of Commons, than I am at 
present: in that case the necessity wou'd have been apparent: 
the ability of the subject wou'd in some degree have warranted 
the thing. I shou'd indeed have been much mortify'd for your 
Grace and for my Lord Chancellor: very little for my own par- 
ticular. Cou'd Mr. Murray's situation have allow' d him to be 
placed at the head of the House of Commons, I shou'd have served 
under him with the greatest pleasure : I acknowledge as much 
as the rest of the world do his superiority in every respect. My 
mortification arises not from silly pride, but from being evidently 
excluded by a negative personal to me (now and for ever) flowing 
from a displeasure utterly irremovable. As to the office of Chan- 
cellor of the Exchequer, I hope your Grace cannot think me 
fill'd with so impertinent a vanity as to imagine it a disparage- 
ment to me to serve under the Duke of Newcastle at the head 

305 



LORD CHATHAM 

of the Treasury: but, my Lord, had I been proposed for that 
honour and the King been once reconciled to the thought of me, 
my honour wou'd have been saved and I shou'd with pleasure 
have declin'd the charge in favour of Mr. Legge from a just 
regard to his Majesty's service. I know my health, at best, is 
too precarious a thing to expose his Majesty's affairs in Parlia- 
ment to suffer delay, perhaps in the middle of a session by being 
in such improper hands. As to the other great office, many cir- 
cumstances of it render an uninterrupted health not so abso- 
lutely necessary to the discharge of it. Were I to fail in it from 
want of health, or, what is still more likely, from want of ability 
and a sufficient knowledge of foreign affairs, a fitter person 
might at any time be substituted without material inconvenience 
to publick business. To conclude, my Lord, and to release your 
Grace from a troublesome correspondent, give me leave to recur 
to your Grace's equity and candour: when the suffrage of the 
party in one instance, and a higher nomination, the Royal 
designation in another, operate to the eternal precluding of a 
man's name being so much as brought in question, what reason- 
able wish can remain for a man so circumstanced (under a first 
resolution, on no account to disturb Government) but that of 
a decent retreat, a retreat of respect, not resentment: of despair 
of being ever accepted to equal terms with others, be his poor 
endeavours ever so zealous. Very few have been the advantages 
and honours of my life : but among the first of them I shall ever 
esteem the honour of , your Grace's good opinion: to that good 
opinion and protection I recommend myself: and hope from it 
that some retreat, neither disagreeable nor dishonourable, may 
(when practicable) be open'd to me. I see with great joy S r 
George Lyttelton and Mr. Grenville in this arrangement, where 
they ought to be. I am persuaded they will be of the greatest 
advantage to your Grace's system. They are both connected 
in friendship with Mr. Legge and with Mr. Murray, who in effect 
is the greatest strength of it in parliament. May every kind 
of satisfaction and honour attend your Grace's labours for his 
Majesty's service. I have the honour, etc. etc. W. Pitt. 

I wrote your Grace by the Post ye 2nd inst. which I hope 
came to your hands.' * 

1 Add. MSS. 32735. f. 21. 
306 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

Two days afterwards he answered Hardwicke. In this 
letter the notable passage is that in which he points to 
retreat, having in his mind, it would seem, some specific 
office: — 'The weight of irremovable royal displeasure is a 
load too great to move under; it must crush any man; it 
has sunk and broken me. I succumb, and wish for nothing 
but a decent and innocent retreat. ... To speak without a 
figure I will presume .... to tell my utmost wish; it is 
that a retreat, not void of advantage or derogatory to 
the rank of the office I hold, might, as soon as prac- 
ticable, be opened to me Out of his Grace's (New- 
castle's) immediate province accommodations of this kind 
arise.' 1 

By the same messenger Pitt wrote to Lyttelton one of 
the terse notes which throw a hundredfold more light on 
his real temper than his more pompous lucubrations, and 
which are infinitely more readable than the long rigmaroles 
which he wrote to official persons. He professes in this to 
be more than satisfied with Newcastle's answer, and also 
with the Chancellor's. 

.... The Duke of Newcastle's letter to me is not only in a 
temper very different from what you saw his Grace in, but is 
writ with a condescension, and in terms so flattering, that it 
pains me. I am almost tempted to think there is kindness at 
the bottom of it, which, if left to itself, would before now have 
shewed itself in effects. If I have not the fruit, I have the leaves 

of it in abundance; a beautiful foliage of fine words The 

Chancellor's letter is the most condescending, friendly, obliging 
thing that can be imagined. I have the deepest sense of his 
goodness for me; but I am really compelled, by every reason fit 
for a man to listen to, to resist (as to the point of activity in 
Parliament) farther than I like to do. I have intimated retreat 
and pointed out such a one in general as I shall really like. 
Resolved not to disturb Government; I desire to be released 

1 Harris's Hardwicke, iii. 8. 

3°7 



LORD CHATHAM 

from the oar of Parliamentary drudgery. I am (un) willing 1 
to sit there and be ready to be called out into action when the 
Duke of Newcastle's personal interests might require, or Gov- 
ernment should deign to employ me as an instrument. I am 
not fond of making speeches (though some may think I am). I 
never cultivated the talent, but as an instrument of action in 
a country like ours 2 

The places were now all rilled: the government was 
made up: Pitt was excluded and proscribed. Fox or 
Murray, he admitted, might reasonably be put over his 
head. But the promotion of Robinson was a personal 
outrage. So he would no longer sit in parliament as a 
subordinate and almost a creature of Newcastle's, member 
for one of his boroughs, paymaster in his administration. 
Pitt was now determined to be free. He would remain 
out of London, and they might see how they got on with- 
out him. When he did return to London they should 
realise what they had lost. Meanwhile he would occupy 
himself with a little architecture and a little gardening; 
all that he was fit for, as he would assure enquirers with 
obsequious sarcasm. 

1 The sense shows clearly that Pitt intended to write ' unwilling. ' 

2 Phillimore, 466. 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 



CHAPTER XVI 

IN the meantime all had been settled by hasty arrange- 
ments in London. Owing to Newcastle's 'overwhelm- 
ing affliction, ' Hardwicke tells us that he himself was com- 
pelled to step forward as a 'kind of minister ab aratro,' and 
make the necessary arrangements. A faint offer of the 
Treasury was made to the Duke of Devonshire, which he 
wisely declined, and, six days after the death of Pelham, 
Newcastle, in spite of his overwhelming affliction, was 
proclaimed his successor. We do not doubt Newcastle's 
sorrow, for in his own way he loved his brother and had 
divided his patrimony with him ; but it is even more certain 
that the Chancellor acted as his watch-dog in front of the 
Treasury. For the Duke, though his timidity was a stand- 
ing jest, could not bear that any one else should obtain 
the rich prize which he coveted and dreaded. And, in 
truth, if that was his view, no one could controvert it, for 
his power in the House of Commons was obvious and unde- 
niable The King seems to have made no trouble. He 
said that he had an open mind, and would be guided by 
the opinion of the Cabinet as to the nomination of their 
new chief. The suggestion shocked Hardwicke. 'To poll 
'in a Cabinet Council for his first minister, which should 
'only be settled in his closet, I could by no means digest.' 
So Hardwicke, with remarkable expedition, took care that 
the Closet, which was the term used to denote the King's 
personal apartment and so his personal authority, should 
pronounce in favour of Newcastle. But the Closet was 
21 3°9 



LORD CHATHAM 

guided by the Cabinet in spite of Hardwicke 's scruples; 
and the Cabinet, a facile caucus, inspired by Hardwicke 
himself, represented to the King as its unanimous opinion 
that Newcastle should be their chief. Horace Walpole tells 
us that it was 'to the astonishment of all men.' To us it 
seems the only natural solution Hardwicke had declared 
that a peer must be placed at the head of the Treasury. 
' That peer must be somebody of great figure and credit in 
the nation, in whom the Whigs will have great confidence. ' 
He was no doubt painting the figure to represent Newcastle. 
But who else could it be? Newcastle was the head of the 
Whigs, the master of parliament, Secretary of State for a 
generation, and the brother of the late First Minister. The 
House of Commons, moreover, consisted mainly of his 
creatures. His nomination to the premiership was easy and 
simple enough. But a formidable difficulty at once pre- 
sented itself. Who should lead the House of Commons? 
It was not that there was a dearth of capable men ; on the 
contrary, there was a terrible embarrassment of riches ; for 
there were Fox, Pitt, and Murray, all men of the first 
eminence in their lines Murray at once let it be known 
that his views lay in another direction ; in any case, he was 
a Scotsman, which was little recommendation, and sus- 
pected of being a Jacobite, which was less. But Fox was 
on the spot, and, though distracted with anxiety for his 
child Charles, who lay dangerously ill, 1 prompt, vigilant, 
and eager. Within a few hours of Pelham's death he had 
sent three humble messages of apology to Hardwicke, with 
whom he was on terms of bitter enmity, made energetic 
advances to Newcastle, and had called at Pitt's London 
house. Soon afterwards he was closeted with Lord Hart- 
ington. It was obvious that no considerations of delicacy 
would stand in his way. But there were strong prejudices 

i Holland House MSS. 
3 IO 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

against him. Hardwicke feared his success, for they had 
quarrelled mortally. He belonged, said the Chancellor, ' to 
a very narrow clique, many of them of the worst sort.' 
His claims rested on his abilities, but even more on the 
friendship of the Duke of Cumberland; perhaps, too, on a 
presumed pliability. 

Pitt was absent, and had the proverbial fate of the 
absent ; he was not merely distant, but could not be moved. 
He had been nearly a year secluded in the country out of 
the atmosphere of London and politics. Horace Walpole 
describes him epigrammatically in a letter written on the 
stirring day after Pelham's death: 'Pitt has no health, no 
party, and has what in this case is allowed to operate, the 
King's negative.' On the other hand, the King had a pre- 
possession for Fox; and the Cabinet, we are told, when it 
recommended Newcastle, unanimously named Fox as the 
proper person to be Secretary of State and manager of the 
House of Commons. What wonder then that Newcastle's 
choice fell on Fox, who at any rate could not be fobbed off 
by stories of the King's insurmountable repugnance and who 
was the favourite of the King's favourite son? The Chan- 
cellor sent his son-in-law, Lord Anson, to Fox with an olive- 
branch. Lady Yarmouth acted as a friendly means of 
communication between Fox and the King. Lord Hart- 
ington acted as the honest broker. Fox was given the 
management of the House of Commons, with the Secretary- 
ship of State vacant by Newcastle's elevation. He was at 
once led by Hartington, like a votive lamb, to the Chancellor, 
with whom a reconciliation was concluded. Thence he was 
conducted to Newcastle, who received him, we need not 
doubt, with his customary effusion, probably with a kiss. 
All went well till the Secret Service money was mentioned. 
This Newcastle said he should distribute as his brother had 
done, without telling anybody anything. Then came the 

3 11 



LORD CHATHAM 

question of patronage. That also was to be reserved to 
Newcastle alone. Lastly, there was the list of nominees for 
ministerial boroughs at the approaching General Election. 
This Newcastle also declined to divulge. In the evening 
Newcastle sent for Hartington. He did not deny that he 
had broken his engagements, but simply declared that he 
would not stand by them. He ' confirmed not his promise 
but his breach of promise in these words: "Who desires 
Mr. Fox to be answerable for anybody but himself in the 
House of Commons? ' ' I then, ' continues Fox, ' was to take 
this great office on the footing of being quite a cypher, and 
being known to have been told so. ' 1 

Newcastle had always intended this and nothing else. 
As Hardwicke judiciously wrote, two days before Newcastle 
saw Fox: ' If the power of the Treasury, the Secret Service 
and the House of Commons is once well settled in safe hands, 
the office of Secretary of State of the Southern province 
will carry very little efficient power along with it.' Fox 
was to be Secretary for the Southern province. But the 
Duke's plan of campaign had the radical defect of making 
the post of manager impossible. For the difference be- 
tween the modern term of ' leadership' and the denomina- 
tion of ' management' was no mere verbal distinction. The 
House of Commons had to be managed by acts of a kind 
more material than the eloquence of a chief, or the seductive 
hints of whips. The leader, in fact, combined the leadership 
with the office of Patronage Secretary. ' The House of 
Commons must have,' as Fox explained on a subsequent 
occasion, 'at least one man in it who shall be the organ of 
His Majesty's parliamentary wishes, and known to be able 
to help or hurt people with His Majesty.' 2 The leader would 
not know how to talk to his followers, when some might be 

1 Holland House MSS. 

2 H. Fox to Argyll, Sept. 26, 1755 (H. H. MSS.)- 

312 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

hirelings and some free, without his knowing which were 
which. He would not be able to promise a borough or a 
place. He would be a mere speaking automaton with a 
wary old chief in concealment working the machine. Fox 
saw that he was cheated. He himself seems to have clung 
for a moment even to the shadow of office which Newcastle 
had proffered. But his friends insisted on his refusal. So 
on the next day or the next day but one, he wrote a curt 
letter, stating that the assurances conveyed to him through 
Lord Hartington had been entirely contradicted by New- 
castle at their interview, and that he preferred to remain 
Secretary at War. ' I remain therefore,' he wrote to Marl- 
borough, ' a little little man, which I think is better than 
a little great man.' 1 But he soon repented, or his friends 
did for him. 2 

Newcastle cared little for the charge of breach of faith. 
He had kept his patronage, and, as he thought, silenced 
Fox, who remained Secretary at War. In a hysterical con- 
dition he hurried to kiss hands for his new office. He flung 
himself at the King's feet, sobbing out ' God bless your 
Majesty! God preserve your Majesty!' embracing the 
royal knees with such howls of adoration that the lord-in- 
waiting had to beg the other courtiers to retire and not 
watch 'a great man in distress'; then, in the zeal of dis- 
cretion, attempting to shut the door on the tittering crowd, 
he jammed the new Minister's foot till genuine roars of 
physical pain drowned the more artificial clamour. 3 Having 
recovered himself after this characteristic performance, 
Newcastle betook himself without delay to the choice of his 
heart, the man whom he had always longed for as a col- 
league, even at the time when he had been seeking a suc- 

1 H. Fox to the Duke of Marlborough, March 22, 1754 (H. H. MSS.). 
» Wingfield MSS. 2246, in Hist. MSS. 
3 Walpole to Bentley, March 17, 1754. 

3*3 



LORD CHATHAM 

cessor to Bedford, an obscure diplomatist, Sir Thomas 
Robinson. 'Had I,' he had written in September, 1750, 
'to chuse for the King, the public, and myself, I would 
prefer Sir Thomas Robinson to any man living. I know 
he knows more and would be more useful to the country 
and me than any other can be.' This opinion seems to 
have been confined to the Duke himself. Horace Walpole 
writing at the moment says: — 'The German Sir Thomas 
Robinson was thought on for the Secretary's seals; but has 
just sense enough to be unwilling to accept them under so 
ridiculous an administration. This is the first act of the 
comedy.' But in the second act Sir Thomas's good sense 
was unequal even to this strain, and he accepted the post. 
Under what hallucination he laboured, or whether he was 
merely beguiled by the fawning caresses of Newcastle, it is 
difficult to say. The fact remains that he undertook to lead 
the House of Commons, seated between Pitt and Fox, whom 
he knew to be malcontents, and capable of anything. His 
own parliamentary powers were in the egg (for he had never 
spoken), and were never destined to be hatched. At the 
time of his appointment as Secretary of State he was Master 
of the Great Wardrobe, a congenial post which he was 
destined during the next year to resume. For in his new 
capacity he justified the anticipations of his enemies, and 
disturbed the equanimity of his friends. Newcastle himself 
had recommended the appointment to Pitt's benevolent 
consideration on the very ground that he could not excite 
the rivalry of existing orators. He ' had not those parlia- 
mentary talents which could give jealousy or in that light 
set him above the rest of the King's servants.' But the 
reality was far below these modest anticipations. Sir 
Thomas was not merely ineffectual and feeble, but would 
attempt on occasion agonising flights of eloquence. Pos- 
terity is spared the perusal of these, for Parliamentary 

3*4 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

history records no word of this unhappy leader. ' Sir 
Thomas, ' says Lord Waldegrave, ' though a good Secretary 
of State, as far as the business of his office and that which 
related to foreign affairs, was ignorant even of the language 
of an House of Commons controversy ; and when he played 
the orator, which he too frequently attempted, it was so 
exceedingly ridiculous that those who loved and esteemed 
him could not always preserve a friendly composure of 
countenance.' This partly arose from his appearance. 
He was a large unwieldy man, and would in debate put 
his arms straight out, which made George Selwyn compare 
him to a signpost. 1 

Such was Sir Thomas; who was to allay the warring 
elements, to appease the Titans and the Giants, to hold the 
scales between Fox and Pitt. Let us, while contemplating 
this grievous and pathetic spectacle, at least take comfort 
that we have arrived at the priceless narrative of Lord 
Waldegrave, a man not brilliant, but shrewd and honest, 
who guides us past the waspish partiality of Horace Walpole, 
the bitterness of Glover, and the corrupt cynicism of 
Dodington with a light which we feel to be the lamp of truth. 
Newcastle, delighted with the consent of Sir Thomas, and 
with the apparent acquiescence of Fox, hastened to com- 
plete his arrangements with the squalid instinct of a jobber. 
Fox was, he thought, muzzled; the formidable task re- 
mained of silencing Pitt. He could not satisfy Pitt directly, 
for that would imply overwhelming difficulties with the 
King, and perhaps with Fox; but he might give indirect 
satisfaction, and detach some of Pitt's little section. In 
this 'last attempt he succeeded. Pitt's friend Legge was 
made Chancellor of the Exchequer, the King only making 
the same condition that he had with regard to Pitt himself, 
that he was never to receive the new minister. It is said, 

1 Colebrooke, i. 18. 
315 



LORD CHATHAM 

indeed, by Horace Walpole that his mean appearance and 
uncouth dialect made him unsuitable for such audiences, 
and that he would have preferred to remain Treasurer of the 
Navy, the lucrative post which had so great a fascination for 
Bubb. George Grenville, one of the Cobham Cousinhood, 
succeeded Legge in this attractive office ; George Lyttelton, 
another, became Cofferer, with his brother as Sub-Cofferer; 
'it is a good £2200 per annum, all taxes deducted,' 1 writes 
George of his new post in the fulness of his heart; and, 
according to Horace Walpole, in the exuberance of his 
satisfaction with that office, he vouched for Pitt's acqui- 
escence in the new arrangements. Newcastle himself 
presented these appointments to Pitt with a satisfaction 
not unalloyed with melancholy presentiments. 'The ap- 
pointment of Mr. Legge was made, ' he writes, ' with a view 
to please all our friends. We knew he was well with the 
old corps, we knew he was happy in your friendship, and 
in your good opinion and in that of your connection; and 
you must allow me to say, that I never could have thought one 
moment of removing you, in the high light which you so justly 
stand, from the office you now possess to be Chancellor of the 
Exchequer with another person at the head of the Treasury. ' 2 

It is perhaps scarcely necessary to explain that the 
italics are not the Duke's, but it seemed necessary to give 
emphasis to so daring a flight. 

'These dispositions being thus made,' he continues, 'it 
was my first view to show you that regard in the person of 
your friends, which it was impossible to do in your own, to 
the degree which you might reasonably expect. The two 
first vacant offices, that of Treasurer of the Navy and 
Cofferer, were by my recommendation given to your two 
first friends, Mr. Grenville and Sir George Lyttelton,' etc. 

1 An Eighteenth Century Correspondence, 230. 

a Newcastle to Pitt, April 2, 1754. Chatham Corr. 

316 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

etc. 'Legge at the Exchequer, unsuitable for you, two of 
your friends as Cofferer and Treasurer'; these were the 
sedatives timidly launched to Pitt, gnashing his teeth at 
Bath over his own impotence and the desertion of his 
friends. So may a despairing traveller have attempted to 
assuage with a few casual comfits the hunger of a Bengal 
tiger crouching for a spring. 

Pitt controlled himself. We have seen his reply 1 to 
Newcastle's shuffling apologies. He continued to write to 
Lyttelton, but with less cordiality. To George Grenville 
he wrote a tepid note of congratulation. To Temple, who 
had been omitted from the arrangements, he addressed him- 
self more cordially, and sent the portrait for which he had 
been sitting to Hoare. It represents no formidable orator, 
but a simpering man of the world ; yet, after the fashion of 
mankind, who secretly cherish the portraits least like them- 
selves, Pitt commended the resemblance. But he took 
occasion to add a phrase which reveals the full bitterness of 
his heart. ' In this portrait, ' he writes, ' I shall have had 
the honour to present myself before you in my very person ; 
not only from the great likeness of the portrait, but, more- 
over, that I have no right to pretend to any other existence 
than that of a man en peinture.' The wrath pierces 
through the confused sentence like a sudden sting : it is not 
often indulged, but it cannot be wholly suppressed. 

Soon afterwards (May, 1754) Temple and his brother 
George paid Pitt a flying visit at Bath, where no doubt 
explanations were exchanged and plans concerted. For, 
putting Pitt on one side, the Minister knew little of human 
nature who could think that he would conciliate Temple by 
promoting his brother George. 

In June, 1754, Pitt at length left Bath and arrived in 
London. He had now been fourteen months absent from 

1 Supra, p. 305. 
3 J 7 



LORD CHATHAM 

the metropolis. In the meantime he had been chosen for 
Newcastle's borough of Aldborough at the General Election 
in the previous April, a somewhat embarrassing connection 
under existing circumstances; though embarrassments of 
this kind are apt to be less irksome in politics than they 
may appear. And Pitt wrote to thank the Duke in terms 
of Oriental submission. ' I thank you for writing to tell me 
of the great honour you have done me at Aldborough, for 
which seat I declined the offer of many others, being anxious 
to be known as your servant.' With whatever grimace 
Pitt may have written this, it strikes one as carrying the 
joke too far. 1 

But when he returned to London in June, he no longer 
affected to conceal his discontent. His complaints were 
obvious and well founded enough. He had not been con- 
sulted, but had only been informed. Nor was the informa- 
tion calculated to gratify him. He had been told at first 
that Fox, whom Bubb at this time calls Pitt's 'inveterate 
enemy, ' had been offered the seals ; then by the next post 
that Fox had refused them and that they had been accepted 
by Robinson. The excuse had then been tendered that 
Pitt's health would not .allow him to accept an offfce of so 
much business and fatigue ; to which he had replied that he 
himself should be the best judge of that. He ought at least 
to have been offered the Exchequer, which had been given 
to the underling Legge. 2 The King in any case should have 
been reconciled to him. When he saw the new minister 
Newcastle asked him his opinion of the arrangements. This 
Pitt at first refused to give, but on being pressed declared 
that 'your Grace may be surprised, but I think Mr. Fox 
should have been at the head of the House of Commons.' 
He met Fox. They had mutual explanations, and no doubt 
assurances of common vengeance to exchange. For Fox 

1 Add. MSS. 32733. Pitt to Newcastle, April 22, 1754. 2 Bubb, 304. 

3i8 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

was as loud in complaint as Pitt. ' Nothing, ' he wrote, ' can 
be more contemptuous than the usage I receive.' 1 

Parliament had risen, so Pitt, after settling the arrears 
in his office, went back to the country. Early in September 
we find him at Astrop Wells. On October 2 he called 
on Newcastle with reference to some business in his office. 
Bubb's account of this interview is well known. When 
they had settled the business which had brought Pitt, the 
Duke wished to enter on affairs in North America, where 
things were looking black, and Washington, then a major, 
had been compelled to surrender to the French at Fort 
Necessity. ' Your Grace, ' said Pitt, ' knows I have no 
capacity for such things,' and declined to discuss them. 2 
Newcastle, who, the same day, wrote an account of the 
interview to Hardwicke, makes no mention of this incident. 
And yet it is too good, too Pitt-like, not to be true. We 
can reconcile the two statements by presuming that it was 
what an opening is to a game of chess, and that Pitt, having 
enjoyed his sarcasm, could not resist the appeal of military 
plans. ' I then acquainted him with what was designed for 
North America, and also with my Lord Granville's notions, 
which had not been followed. He talked up the affair of 
North America very highly — that it must be supported in 
all events and at all risks — that the Duke's scheme was a 
very good one as far as it went — that it might do some- 
thing: that it did not go near far enough — that he could 
not help agreeing with my Lord Granville — that he was for 
doing both, sending the regiments and raising some thousand 
men in America — that we should do it once for all — that 
it was not to be done by troops from Europe — that mere 
France would be too strong for us — that we should have 
soon to countenance the Americans, &c. — that the Duke's 
proposals for artillery, &c, were infinitely too short. This 

1 Aug. 29, 1754. H. H. MSS. 2 Bubb, 317. 

319 



LORD CHATHAM 

discourse, joined with Lord Anson's opinion, has made me 
suspend at least the stopping the orders for the raising two 
regiments, &c, and for providing all the artillery promised 
by the Duke.' 1 

What a scene of confusion ! Here are three stages re- 
vealed: the orders, the stopping the orders, the suspending 
the stopping the orders! Pitt, it is evident, though begin- 
ning with a refusal, ended by speaking with authority. 

Hardwicke, however, who had made a merit to Pitt of 
having sustained his claim to be Secretary, waxed suspi- 
cious on receiving Newcastle's letter. 'I am glad,' he 
replies, ' your Grace has talked to Mr. Pitt upon these meas- 
ures. As he expressed himself so zealously and sanguinely 
for them, I hope he will support them in Parliament, and 
I dare say your Grace did not omit the opportunity of 
pressing that upon him. There is something remarkable 
in that gentleman's taking a measure of the Duke's so 
strongly to heart, and arguing even to carry it further. I 
think that sett used to be against warlike measures. ' 2 

Suspicion tainted every political breeze. The vigilant 
celibates in Cranford did not keep a closer watch on their 
neighbours' proceedings than did the public men of those 
days on each other. The mere fact of Pitt's commending 
a project of Cumberland, his former enemy, at once implied 
to Hardwicke that he was in harmony and understanding 
with Fox, Cumberland's right-hand man. And indeed 
Bubb assures us that this was the case. Fox and Pitt 
were agreed as to the division of the spoils, when spoils 
there should be. Fox was to be head of the Treasury 
and Pitt Secretary of State; 'but neither will assist the 
other. ' 

All this came to nothing, and therefore need not detain 

» Newcastle to Hardwicke, Oct. 2, 1754. Add. MSS. 32737. 
2 Hardwicke to Newcastle, Oct. 3, 1754. Add. MSS. 32737. 

320 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

us now; for Pitt was occupied with something far more 
vital to him than Fox, or Newcastle, or the distant echoes 
of American warfare. He had come up from Wotton, the 
residence of George Grenville, where in the last days of 
September he had plighted his troth to Lady Hester Gren- 
ville, the sister of the Grenvilles, and he was now hurrying 
back to join her at Stowe. The engagement was in some 
respects remarkable. Pitt was now forty-six and Lady 
Hester was thirty-three. When Pitt first went to Stowe 
in 1735 she was fourteen, and in the nineteen years that had 
elapsed they must have seen each other constantly. How 
was it then that the cripple of forty-six suddenly flung 
away his crutches to throw himself at the feet of this mature 
young lady? It seems inexplicable, but love affairs are 
often inexplicable. And we know little or nothing of 
Pitt's loves. Except the childish passage at Besancon, there 
is only the statement of Horace Walpole, a spiteful gossip 
if ever there was one, that Lady Archibald Hamilton had 
lost the affections of Frederick Prince of Wales by giving 
him Pitt as a rival. 1 This lacks confirmation and even 
probability. Were it true, it might be a clue to phases 
of Pitt's connection with Leicester House. He seems, 
too, as we have seen in a letter of Lyttelton's, to have 
had a tenderness for Lyttelton's sister Molly. Then there 
was another Molly, Molly West, with whom, it is said, 
he had been in love, the sister of his friend Gilbert, who 
afterwards married Admiral Hood, Lord Bridport. Want 
of means, we are told, prevented their union. But the 
authority for this is unknown to us. 2 

This much at least is certain, that no man ever had a 
nobler or more devoted wife. She survived him to witness 
the glories and almost the death of her second son, dying 
in April 1803. At Orwell there is a picture of her by 

1 Orford, i. 76. 2 An Eighteenth Century Correspondence, p. 154. 

321 



LORD CHATHAM 

Gainsborough, painted in 1747, dressed in white with jewels, 
with a pleasant rather than a beautiful face. There is 
another portrait at Chevening painted in 1750, which re- 
presents her with auburn hair, a long upper lip, and a 
nose slightly turned up; comely and intelligent, but no 
more. Mrs. Montagu rather confirms this impression: 'I 
believe Lady Hester Grenville is very good-humoured, 
which is the principal article in the happiness of the Mar- 
ried State. Beauty soon grows familiar to the lover,' 1 and 
so forth; from which we may infer that Lady Hester was 
not at any rate a reigning toast. Her appearances are 
rare but full of tenderness; she watched over her husband 
with exquisite devotion; furthering and anticipating his 
wishes, which were often fanciful and extravagant; shield- 
ing his moments of nervous prostration with the wings of 
an angel. On her rested often, if not always, the care of 
his affairs, often, if not always, disordered, and all the bur- 
dens of household management. For many months she 
was his sole channel of communication with the outer 
world. The wives of statesmen are not invariably suc- 
cessful, though they are generally devoted; but none was 
ever more absorbed in her high but harassing duty. In all 
the bitterness of that bitter time, when her husband seemed 
surrounded by implacable enmities, no one found a word 
to say against her. Pitt's choice seems to have been as wise 
as it was deliberate. 

Camelford, from whom the worst interpretation can 
always be obtained, says: 'His marriage was unexpected. 
He was no longer young, and his infirmities made him older 
than his years, when, upon a visit to Mr. Grenville at Wot- 
ton, Lady Hester made an impression upon him that was 
the more extraordinary as she was by no means new to him. 
The first hints he gave of his intentions were eagerly seized 

1 Mrs. Montagu's Letters, in. 273. 
322 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

by her, saying she should be unworthy the honour he 
proposed to her if she could hesitate a moment in accept- 
ing it. With a very common understanding and totally 
devoid of tenderness, or of any feeling but pride and ambi- 
tion, she contrived to make herself a good wife to him by 
a devotion and attachment that knew no bounds. She 
lived only in his glory, and that vanity absorbed every 
other idea of her mind. She was his nurse, his flatterer, 
his housekeeper and steward, and, though her talent was 
by no means economy, yet she could submit to any priva- 
tion that would gratify his wants or his caprices. If he 
loved anyone it must be her who had no love but for him, 
or rather for his reputation. Yet I saw no sacrifices on his 
part for her ease and quiet or to the essential comforts of 
her life. ' 

As to Lady Hester's having a 'very common under- 
standing ' and being ' totally devoid of tenderness ' we need 
not rest on tradition, though that is all the other way; for 
the superiority of her understanding and her tenderness are 
amply proved by the admirable letters published from the 
Pretyman Papers by Lord Ashbourne ; and her devotion to 
her husband is attested by Camelford himself. How he 
became acquainted with the details of courtship, usually 
mysterious enough, and in those days more veiled than in 
these, we need not trouble to inquire. When it took 
place Pitt was taking time which he could ill spare to write 
letters of anxious and affectionate solicitude to Camelford 
at Cambridge, and receiving in return the most unbounded 
assurances of grateful devotion. 

Pitt's love letters, alas! survive; the treasures of his 
wife, but the despair of posterity. That a great genius 
presumably in love should send such stilted, pompous, arti- 
ficial documents as tokens of his passion to the object of 
his affections is one of the mysteries of brain and heart. 

3 2 3 



LORD CHATHAM 

They are as wretched in their way as the letters of Burns to 
Clarinda, and shall not be quoted here. 

Having paid his betrothed a flying visit at Stowe, the 
blithe bridegroom had as usual to proceed to Bath, where 
he remained a fortnight inditing these execrable epistles 
of rhetorical affection. 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 



, CHAPTER XVII 

ON November 14th, the very day of the opening of 1754 
Parliament, Pitt brought forward a bill for the relief 
of the Chelsea Pensioners, who, from receiving their pen- 
sions a year in arrear, fell inextricably into the hands of 
usurers. He was in haste to perform this useful duty, for 
on November 16th he was married by special license to Lady 
Hester at Argyll Buildings, Dr. Ayscough officiating; 
and Solomon and Esther, as Lady Townshend called them, 
thence departed for the honeymoon to West's house of 
Wickham in Kent. That interval of seclusion did not 
last long, but it would seem to have effected a striking trans- 
formation. The marriage marks a new ascent in Pitt's 
career; love seemed to have transformed him; always 
powerful and eloquent, he became sublime. Into his 
former qualities there had passed an inspiration kindred to 
the divine passion which makes the poet. The timid war- 
blers of the grove, as he was afterwards to call them, the 
politicians who sought quiet lives and safe places, the arch- 
jobber himself who had for years deluded him, were in an 
instant to realize that a new terror was added to life. For 
on November 25th he was once more in the House of Com- 
mons. At this time, just before or just after the meeting of 
Parliament, he had come to open words with Newcastle. 
The Duke had offered the usual palliatives. ' Fewer words, 
if you please, my Lord,' replied Pitt contemptuously, 'for 
your words have long lost all weight with me.' Fox had 
said much the same to Newcastle in March. The new min- 
22 325 



LORD CHATHAM 

ister had therefore been grossly insulted by the two first 
men in the House of Commons. He must have felt that 
there were menacing symptoms in the political horizon. It 
is strange, therefore, to find Walpole writing that, as ' New- 
castle had secured by employments almost every material 
speaker in Parliament, ' it was hoped that the session might 
pass in settling election petitions. 1 

It seems incredible that the Duke can have so flattered 
himself. But no doubt he relied on two main consider- 
ations. One was that, though official discipline was then 
incomparably more lax than now, it was scarcely possible 
for Pitt or Fox to mean mischief so long as they kept their 
places, and these they had not resigned. The -other was 
this. The General Election had just been conducted under 
his auspices, and had returned a House of Commons devoted 
to himself. Indeed in all England there were only forty -two 
contests. In some Continental countries a general . elec- 
tion always returns a ministerial majority; there are mys- 
teries connected with the proceeding of which only ministers 
have the key. This to some extent was the case in Eng- 
land at this period, and no Secretary of the Treasury, no 
Martin or Robinson, understood his particular business 
better than Newcastle. But whatever his allusions, they 
were soon destined to be disturbed, for on November 25th 
Pitt opened fire on him. Of that famous scene and out- 
burst we are fortunate enough to possess two brilliant 
descriptions: one by Horace Walpole, and one, even more 
graphic, which has the additional value of being written by 
Pitt's rival, Henry Fox. Fox, writing in a white heat 
of generous admiration, describes it summarily as 'the 
finest speech that ever Pitt spoke, and perhaps the most 
remarkable.' This last epithet was probably due to the 
fact that the speech was apparently made on the spur of the 

1 Orford, i. 406-7. 
326 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

moment. The occasion was one of those election petitions 
on which the Duke had relied as a sedative and a pastime 
for his faithful Commons. Wilkes, the pleasant, worthless 
demagogue, who was afterwards to cause so much trouble, 
had petitioned against the return of Delaval, the sitting 
member for Berwick. Delaval had defended his seat in a 
speech full of -wit and buffoonery, which kept the House 
in a roar of laughter; much the same speech, one would 
guess, that Pitt himself had delivered on the proceedings 
at his own election for Seaford when those were attacked. 
But to-day he was in a different mood, and, as the debate 
proceeded, came down from, the gallery where he was 
seated, and intervened with a frown. He was 'astonished 
to hear this merriment when such a matter was concerned. 
Was the dignity of the House on so sure a foundation that 
we could afford to shake it with scoffs?' In an instant the 
House was cowed into silence, like schoolboys found in 
fault by their master. You could have heard a pin drop 
as he continued. 

1 Had it not, on the contrary, been diminishing for years, 
till now we were brought to the very brink of a precipice 
where, if ever, a stand must be made? Were we ourselves 
within the House to try and lessen that dignity when such 
attacks were made upon it from without that it was almost 
lost? On the contrary, it wanted support, for it was scarcely 
possible to recover it.' He appealed to the Speaker (On- 
slow) with profuse compliments, for the Speaker only could 
restore it — yet scarcely even he. Then he eloquently 
adjured all Whigs to rally and unite in defence of their 
liberties, which were attacked, nay, dying, 'unless,' he pas- 
sionately added, ' you will degenerate into a little assembly 
serving no other purpose than to register the arbitrary edicts 
of one too-powerful subject'; laying an emphasis on the 
words ' one ' and ' subject' that might well send a shudder 

3 2 7 



LORD CHATHAM 

to the soul of Newcastle, when the echo should reach him. 
He ended by a recapitulation as to 'our being likely to 
become an appendix to — I know not what : I have no name 
for it.' 'All,' adds Fox, 'whether pleased or displeased, 
declare this speech to be the finest that ever was made.' 1 
The effect of this sudden menace in the midst of the l)uke's 
comfortable arrangements to appease and silence everybody, 
was appalling. It came with the shattering effect of a shell, 
and a shell falling in some quiet picnic. The Ministers were 
in consternation; every member sat confounded. Murray, 
pale and miserable, shrunk his head in silence. Wilkes used 
to narrate his dread, as he heard the awful tone of Pitt's ex- 
ordium, lest the thunder that he saw was gathering should 
fall on him. Never, he said, when at Westminster School 
had he felt greater terror when summoned for a flogging, 
never when let' off a greater relief than on this occasion; 
terror when uncertain where the bolt would fall, relief when 
he found it was destined for another. 2 Fox himself only 
came in as Pitt was finishing, just in time to witness the 
devastation which had been caused. Legge, on the part of 
the Government, had to rise and humbly deprecate the wrath 
of the orator. 

Pitt allowed no respite. On the same evening a discus- 
sion arose as to the dates on which the various petitions 
would be taken. That relating to Reading was fixed for a 
particular day, and that for Colchester on a day soon after- 
wards. Pitt moved the postponement of the Colchester 
petition ; as the Reading one would take time, and concerned 
a noble lord, Lord Fane, for whom he had a particular re- 
gard. A malignant fate here tempted the new Secretary of 
State to a needless and unhappy intervention. He declared 

1 Fox to Hartington, Nov. 26, 1754, in Waldegrave, p. 146. Orford, i. 408. 
Cf. Calcraft to Digby, Nov. 26, 1754, in Wingfield MSS. 

2 Butler's Rem., i. 144. 

328 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

that the Reading petition would be a short case, and, so 
far as concerned the sitting member, a poor case ; that Lord 
Fane had only a majority of one. 

This gave Pitt his opportunity, and he soundly trounced 
the unfortunate Minister. What did Sir Thomas know 
about it? It was ignorant presumption to lay down the 
law about a case which had not been heard. If this was the 
method of the Minister, there would be short work with 
elections. He himself had little thought to see so melan- 
choly a day as this, but he was not to be taught his duty by 
Sir Thomas or any one else. Sir Thomas replied, 'with 
pomp, confusion, and warmth,' to deprecate the misleading 
effects of mere eloquence. He hoped that words would not 
be allowed more than their due weight. For his own part, 
he was performing the duties of an office which he had never 
desired. Pitt in his rejoinder affected to believe this last 
statement, with the unkind commentary that if anybody 
else had wished for the post, Sir Thomas would not have had 
it. Then, artfully cooling down, he showed that he was only 
aiming at Newcastle, for he professed the highest respect for 
,Sir Thomas with this cruel, backhand blow at the Duke, 
1 that he thought him, Sir Thomas, as able as any man that 
had of late years filled that office, or was likely to fill it.' 
Fox could no longer resist joining in the sport of baiting his 
hapless leader. He also could only explain and excuse Sir 
Thomas's pronouncing hastily and summarily on a case 
which he had not heard by his long residence abroad, and 
by his consequent and total inexperience of parliamentary 
matters. . 

It was clear that neither of the formidable lieutenants 
was in the least appeased, or likely to contribute to the 
tranquillity of the session. Still it was also clear that the 
members of the House were loyal to Newcastle and his 
deputy, and that they were not moved from their allegiance 

3 2 9 



LORD CHATHAM 

by the oratory to which they had listened. But when the 
display was over, the frightened ministerialists gathered into 
small groups whispering their terrors to each other. Pitt's 
fury breaking out at this moment might be due, thought 
Fox, in some measure to accident. ' But break out I knew 
it would. And the Duke of Newcastle may thank himself 
for the violence of it (he) having .... owned to Pitt that 
he had acquainted the King with part of their last conversa- 
tion; adding, like an idiot, "to do you good, to do you 
good," and that he had not mentioned that part which 
could do him harm. ' 1 We do not know what is the interview 
to which this refers; it can hardly be that which occurred 
at the beginning of October in which Pitt had said, ' Your 
Grace, I suppose, knows that I have no capacity for such 
things. ' So we are at a loss to know the immediate cause of 
Pitt's outbreak, though no divination is required to know 
that ever since Pelham's death he had been explosive. 

Nothing can better illustrate the extraordinary power 
which Newcastle wielded in the House of Commons than 
the dumb terrified fidelity of the great majority who clung 
to his knees in spite of the attacks of Pitt and Fox. Hapless 
majority! They had neither voice nor faith; they despised 
almost equally their nominal chief Robinson, and their real 
chief Newcastle ; so they huddled together for warmth and 
sympathy. And this was a House of Commons produced by 
a general election carried on under the auspices of a consum- 
mate manipulator and by long years of cozening, patronage, 
and corruption. The success had been complete, a devoted 
and passive majority had been returned, and this was the 
result. It was a strange and instructive spectacle. This 
docile flock was shepherdless, it was not thought to need 
any superintendence, it had only to receive its instructions 
from Newcastle through the channel of some such agent as 

1 Waldegrave, 149-50. 
330 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

Robinson. What Newcastle thought well to give, it was 
prepared gladly to take. Could Minister want more ? Yet, 
before the session was a fortnight old, Newcastle was to 
learn, but not completely, the futility of such a scheme of 
government. He had promised the King that the new 
House of Commons would need no leader, that indeed the 
position of leader of the House of Commons was both dan- 
gerous in power and superfluous in practice. He was yet to 
learn that there was something more formidable; a ship 
without captain or helmsman, and two loose cannon banging 
about at large. 

For, two days after the annihilation of Robinson, Pitt 
again took the field, this time against Murray, the most 
formidable antagonist that he ever had to face after the 
resignation of Walpole. It was on the vote for the army. 
Barrington and Nugent had made fulsome speeches, dwell- 
ing on the popularity of the King and the Ministry, declaring, 
indeed, that there were no Jacobites in England. People, 
said Nugent, sometimes reared those whom they thought 
would be Jacobites, but who turned out very differently. 
So had he seen in his rural retirement a hen, which had 
hatched duck's eggs, watch with apprehension her nurslings 
betake themselves to the water. Pitt rose and declared 
with solemn pleasantry that this image had greatly struck 
him, 'for, sir, I know of such a hen.' The hen, it appeared, 
was the University of Oxford. This, we think, in its demure 
unexpectedness, is the best stroke of humour in all his 
speeches. But he begged the House not to be sure that all 
she hatched would ever entirely forget what she had taught 
them. Then followed an innuendo at old Horace Walpole 
which is immaterial and obscure. Sir Roger Newdigate, 
whose name is still cherished by budding poets, rose, as 
member for the University, to make a meek defence. Pitt 
rose again, and told 'inimitably' the story of a recent ad- 

33 1 



LORD CHATHAM 

venture at Oxford. He was with a party at the Angel Inn, 
one of whom was asked to sing ' God save Great George our 
King ' (one can hardly imagine that it was Pitt who called 
for this) . The chorus was re-echoed by undergraduates out- 
side who had been attracted by the song, 'but with addi- 
tions of the rankest treason. ' Then walking down the High 
Street he examined a print in a shop window of a young 
Highlander in a blue ribbon, and was shocked to read the 
motto Hunc saltern ever so Juvenem. This Latin prayer was 
a flagrant proo'f of the disloyalty of that learned body. ' In 
both speeches every word was Murray; yet so managed that 
neither he nor anybody else could or did take public notice 
of it, or in any degree reprehend him. I,' it is Henry Fox 
who speaks, 'sate next Murray, who suffered for an hour.' 1 
Two episodes seem to attach themselves to this terrible on- 
slaught. One is the famous and dramatic menace. Fixing 
his eyes on Murray the orator paused and proceeded: 'I 
must now address a few words to Mr. Solicitor. — They shall 
be few, but they shall be daggers.' Murray's agitation was 
now visible. 'Judge Festus trembles,' thundered Pitt; 
'well, he shall hear me some other day,' and sat down. 2 
Murray could not muster a reply. We may be sure that 
he then mentally resolved that, whether Festus or not, he 
would be a Judge as soon as possible. 2 Yet Granville had 
embraced him that very day and bid him pluck up reso- 
lution. The other episode is this. Foote went with 
Murphy (afterwards Editor of the 'Test') to hear Pitt, who 
happened to be putting forth his full powers in an attack 
on Murray. 'Shall we go home now?' asked Murphy at 
last. ' No,' replied Foote, 'let us wait till he has made the 
little man vanish entirely. ' 3 

1 Fox to Harrington, Nov. 28, 1754, in Waldegrave, p. 150. Orford, i. 142. 

2 Butler's Rem., i. 145. 

» Table Talk of S. Rogers, p. 100. 

33 2 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

The plan of ignoring the House of Commons and keep- 
ing all power in a junto of two or three, or even one, was 
already breaking down. ' ft is the universal opinion, ' writes 
Fox, in the same letter as that in which he describes Pitt's 
onslaught on Murray, ' that business cannot go on as things 
are now, and that offers will be made to Pitt or me. On 
this subject Pitt was with me two hours yesterday morn- Nov. 27,1754 
ing. A difficult conversation.' Difficult indeed, for both 
parties fenced with each other, and neither was sincere. 
Pitt had long distrusted Fox and his connection with Cum- 
berland. We have seen that in March he was writing con- 
fidentially that he wished 'to see as little power in Fox's 
hand as possible, ' and again in the same letter, ' Fox is too 
odious to last for ever. ' On the other hand, Fox, who was 
genial but ignoble, was determined to take the best place 
that offered, with a secret leaning to the lucrative possibilities 
of Pitt's office. Fox was not in error as to the offers. He 
wrote on November 28, and on November 29 Newcastle was 
beginning to seek assistance. On that morning the King 
sent for Fox and treated him with friendly confidence. It 
then appeared that the royal leaning towards Fox was 
caused by the King's having found out that Frederick Prince 
of Wales had made overtures to Fox, who had rejected them, 
but had not divulged them for the purpose of paying court 
to the King. 1 

The object of the Court was to separate Fox and Pitt. 
This last, doubtful and suspicious, had at first assured the 
Chancellor and Newcastle that he would not league with Fox. 
This was probably the secret of the Minister's confidence. 
But when Pitt realised that the Duke was trading on the 
division between his two formidable auxiliaries he sought, 
or appeared to seek, an honest and hearty co-operation with 
his rival. 2 

1 Orford, i. 417. 2 lb. 418. 

333 



LORD CHATHAM 

' Could you bear to act under Fox ? ' Hardwicke had 
asked him, and ' Leave out under; it will never be a word 
between us: Mr. Fox and I shall never quarrel,' had been 
the reply. 

Alas ! for the loves of statesmen, often ardent and always 
precarious. The vague bait was no sooner dangled before 
Fox than he began to eye it with avidity and to contemplate 
the abandonment of Pitt. He sought the advice of two 
friends, Cumberland and Marlborough. The last advised 
him to ask for admission to the Cabinet and to be satisfied 
with that advantage. Cumberland dissuaded him, as it 
would seem, from parting company with Pitt, and used these 
remarkable words: ' I don't know him, but by what you tell 
me, Pitt is what is scarce — he is a man.' But at last 
both dukes concurred in Marlborough's advice, with the 
proviso that Fox should make it a condition that he was not 
to oppose Pitt ; a singular reservation when it is remembered 
that his help was only sought against Pitt, as he was soon 
made distinctly to understand. Fox apparently took Pitt 
into his confidence, and they exchanged cordial notes, He 
submitted to Pitt his letter to the King, and Pitt approved 
it with some omissions. Nothing must be said, he declared, 
which remotely implied that he would do the least thing to 
keep his place. 1 So Fox wrote to say that, understanding 
the King was determined to have no leader in the House of 
Commons, but wished to have him take a forward and 
spirited part on behalf of the ministry, he desired some 
mark of his Majesty's favour to show that he enjoyed his 
Majesty's confidence. Waldegrave, who conducted the ne- 
gotiation, was given to understand that the distinction 
aimed at was a seat in the Cabinet. He was further told 
that Fox would never accept Pitt's rich place, which the 

1 See Pitt's obscure note in Chatham Corresp. i. 130, and the interpreta- 
tion in Orford, i. 419. 

334 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

King had said was destined for him in the event of Pitt's 
dismissal, lest it be said that he was answering Pitt for 
money. So the stipulation about not opposing Pitt was 
already out of his contemplation. The negotiations ex- 
tended oyer months. The King had first seen Fox on 
November 29, 1754, but did not signify to Fox his admission 
to the Cabinet till April 26, 1755, two days before his 
Majesty left for Hanover. Fox was also admitted to the 
Council of Regency during the King's absence. 

During these months of negotiation his opposition to 
the ministry ceased, and Pitt was left alone. But he com- 
municated constantly and secretly with Pitt as to the offers 
made. When he had closed with them, without waiting 
for the cock to crow, he forswore Pitt. 1 He was no doubt 
made to understand distinctly, as he must always have 
known, that it was the condition of his elevation. This 
treachery cost him dear; for Pitt, who seems to have been 
at once apprised of the desertion, probably by a minister 
whose interest it was to keep the two apart, never forgave 
it. Nor could a man much less irritably and jealously proud 
have done otherwise. So much for the question of honour. 
As to the question of policy it is clear that a real union 
between Pitt and himself would have been irresistible. But 
Fox at the first temptation forsook this honourable alliance, 
and forsook it for a feather, as the lure was justly described. 

It should be mentioned that this account of Fox's be- 
haviour is founded on the narrative of Horace Walpole, 
and that Waldegrave, who is far more trustworthy, says 
that ' Fox during the whole negotiation behaved like a man 
of sense and a man of honour. ' But this only regards his 
negotiation with Newcastle, in which Waldegrave acted as 
the channel. Walpole, on the other hand, was notoriously 
partial to Fox, and in his confidence, so that his statement 

1 Orford, i. 420. 

335 



LORD CHATHAM 

may be taken as accurate. In no other way, indeed, can 
the breach between the two statesmen be adequately ex- 
plained. On April 26 they are on the most confidential 
footing. On May 9 there is a public rupture. Fox, in- 
deed, attributes this sudden breach to Pitt's wish to be well 
at Leicester House; but then Fox had to find an ostensible 
reason, as he did not know that Pitt was aware of his 
desertion. 
Apr. 27, 1 7s 5 The day after the admission of Fox to the Cabinet, 
Newcastle dispatched old Horace Walpole to Pitt to see if 
they could not come to terms. Old Horace, who has suffered 
from the constant malignity of his nephew, but who appears 
to have been a laborious and public-spirited man, with a 
not uncommon itch for a coronet, undertook the commission 
with alacrity; but found, as all did who attempted to ne- 
gotiate for Newcastle, that his powers were far from ample, 
and shrunk from the moment that they were given. It is 
probable that these overtures were only made in consequence 
of some secret agreement between Fox and Pitt that Pitt's 
claims should be pushed ; for it is otherwise inexplicable that 
they should have been made simultaneously with the cap- 
ture of Fox, and that Newcastle on the slenderest grounds 
should at once have withdrawn the commission. The 
hypothesis of a sham negotiation, entered upon to keep to 
the letter of some understanding arrived at through Fox, is 
highly congenial to the character of Newcastle; nor is it 
likely that Fox can have joined the Government, when in 
the closest communication with Pitt, without some such 
stipulation. 

Whatever the nature of the overture may have been, Pitt 
received Walpole, with whom he was on cordial terms, not 
unfavourably. He stipulated that he should be admitted 
to the Cabinet, but not, it would appear, immediately (for 
the King was going abroad next day) ; and that in case of a 

336 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

vacancy he should be promised the seals of Secretary of 
State. No one could- deem these conditions excessive, and 
Walpole approved them. But Newcastle would have none 
of them, and soundly rated his emissary. It is clear that 
the negotiation was illusory and unreal ; for what less terms 
could Newcastle have expected Pitt to demand? 1 

A fortnight afterwards Pitt went to Lord Hillsborough's, May 9 , i 7 « 
where he met Fox. When Fox had gone he declared that all 
was at an end between Fox and himself ; that the ground was 
altered; Fox was a Regent and a Cabinet minister, and he 
was left isolated. Fox returned, and Pitt, in great heat, 
repeated what he had said with even more violence. He 
would not accept the seals from Fox (this seems to confirm 
our hypothesis as to the sham negotiation through Walpole), 
for that would be to acknowledge a superiority and an 
obligation. ' What, then, ' said Fox, ' would put us on an 
equality?' 'A winter in the Cabinet and a summer's 
Regency, ' replied Pitt, in allusion to what Fox had accepted. 

Next day Hillsborough expostulated with Pitt, who, 
however, remained unmoved, and begged him to convey 
as a message to Fox that all connection between them was 
at an end. Pitt added that though he esteemed Fox he 
wished to have no further conversation on this subject. In 
spite of this, during the next few days they had a further 
conference at Holland House, but with no better result. 2 

On this second occasion (May 12, 1755) Pitt formally 
declared their connection at an end. Fox asked if Pitt 
suspected him of ill faith in the recent negotiations. Pitt, 
on his honour, held him blameless. 'Then,' asked Fox, 
'are our lines incompatible?' 'Not incompatible, but 
convergent,' a word that Fox professed not to understand. 
In the future it was possible they might act together, 

1 Coke's Lord Walpole, ii. 406. 

2 Bubb, 319-21; Orford, ii. 37. 

337 



LORD CHATHAM 

not now. On this or some proximate occasion, Pitt blurted 
out what was at least one cause of offence. 'Here is the 
Duke of Cumberland King and you his minister.' The 
Duke, like Fox himself, was only an ordinary member of 
the Council of Regency, so that Pitt's taunt was absurd. 
But Pitt was looking to the young court of Leicester 
House which detested and distrusted Cumberland; hence 
this outburst of jealousy and wrath. Pitt indeed, the day 
before, had seen the Princess of Wales; who, it was pre- 
sumed, had insisted on an open and immediate rupture 
with Fox as the price of her support. But beneath all 
there was we think, in spite of all professions, undying 
suspicion of Fox's rectitude in the recent negotiation with 
Newcastle. 1 

1 The accession of Fox to the Cabinet is beset with small difficulties of 
chronology. Horace Walpole in his Memoirs (i. 147) tells us that the King 
sent for Fox on November 29, 1754, and in a letter of January 9, 1755, announces 
that Fox had been admitted to the Cabinet. Yet we have Fox's own letter 
to Pitt of April 26, 1755, announcing that the King that afternoon had signified 
to him his admission to the Cabinet. (Chatham Corresp. i. 132). It is 
evident that Horace Walpole believed, prematurely, that the matter was 
settled early in January. Strangely enough our surest authority in all these 
transactions, except Waldegrave, who is vague and dateless, is the corrupt 
and perfidious Bubb. 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 



CHAPTER XVIII 

IT was soon clear to Newcastle that Fox after all might 
not suffice, and that Pitt must be again approached. 
The King, then in Hanover and beyond Newcastle's 
control, was negotiating new treaties of subsidy on behalf 
of his German dominions; one with Hesse Cassel for a 
contingent of 12,000 men to act in defence of Hanover or 
Great Britain, the other with Russia for an army of 40,000 
men for the defence of Hanover. It was terrible for the 
Duke to contemplate what Pitt might say and do with 
regard to such unpopular and indefensible instruments. 
Moreover, Pitt was now supported by the court, every day 
more and more important, of Leicester House. It was 
probably Hardwicke, who as the moving brain of the 
Cabinet saw the vital importance of securing Pitt, and 
who was, we think, sincerely favourable to Pitt's pretensions, 
if only from hatred of Fox, who suggested these nego- 
tiations; and it was his son Charles Yorke who entered 
upon them. Yorke was to act as a skirmisher, to get in 
touch with Pitt, and to report on the temper in which he 
found him. They met on July 6 (1755), and talked over 
the abortive conference with Walpole. Pitt declared that 
he had then waived the immediate bestowal of the Secre- 
taryship of State, but had asked not merely that Newcastle 
should speak on his behalf before the King left for Hanover, 
and urge that he was the proper person to lead the debates 
in the House of Commons ; but that Lady Yarmouth should 
also be interested in his cause, so that she might use her 
influence with the King during their stay abroad. 

339 



LORD CHATHAM 

Of Newcastle himself he spoke with supreme disdain. 
It was a waste of time to bring him assurances of friend- 
ship and confidence from Newcastle. All that was over. 
He would never owe Newcastle a favour, he would accept 
nothing as an obligation to Newcastle. This is not in 
Yorke's account, because probably it would be shown to 
Newcastle. But it comes authentically enough from Pitt's 
brother-in-law, James Grenville, to Bubb. If Newcastle 
were really in earnest, he would say that he could listen to 
no proposition but this: 'This is our policy; and the post 
of Secretary of State, in which you shall support it, is 
destined for you.' 

Yorke reported to his father, and Hardwicke saw Pitt 
on August 8th (1755), with power to offer a seat in the 
Cabinet. After compliments, to use Eastern language, 
which were usually the preface of such interviews, in which 
both parties assured each other of high mutual esteem, 
which Pitt went so far on this occasion as to declare for 
Newcastle, in strange contrast with his language to Yorke, 
they came at once to the point. Before he could take 
what was required, 'a clear, active, and cordial part in 
support of the King's measures in the House of Commons, ' 
Pitt desired to know what those measures might be. Hard- 
wicke at once specified them. ' 'Twas all open and above 
board; the support of the maritime and American war, 
in which we were going to be engaged, and the defence of 
the King's German dominions, if attacked on account of 
the English cause. The maritime and American war he 
came roundly into, tho' very orderly, and allowed the 
principle and obligation of honour and justice as to the 
other, but argued strongly as to the practicability of it. 
That subsidiary treaties would not go down; the nation 
could not hear' (obviously 'bear') them. That they were a 
connection and a chain, and would end in a general plan for 

340 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

the Continent which the country would (obviously ' could ') 
not possibly support. Then he went into financial con- 
siderations. The maritime and American war would alone 
add two millions a year to the National Debt, which could 
not bear an addition of one million. He would treat 
Hanover like any other foreign dependency of the British 
Crown; the worst that could happen was that it should be 
occupied by the enemy for a time and restored at a peace, 
and that then compensation might be given to the King. 
As to the subsidies, Hessian and Russian, he asked questions 
but did not commit himself. But he inquired, with peculiar 
emphasis, what others, such as Fox, Legge, Lee, and 
Egmont, thought of them. At last he said he must consult 
his friends, one of whom, Legge, the Chancellor of the 
Exchequer, he was about to visit. But why, asked Hard- 
wicke, should he not see Newcastle himself? 'With all 
my heart, if he would see me,' replied Pitt. To the offer 
of a seat in the Cabinet he said neither yea nor nay, but 
he was, thought Hardwicke, gratified by the overture. 1 

One cannot but note the strange contrast between Pitt's 
language about Newcastle to Hardwicke and that which he 
had used to Yorke. ' He expressed great regard for your 
Grace and me.' But this was the base coinage in political 
use at that time, and Pitt had by this time become a master 
of dissimulation. Fox hated Newcastle to the full as much 
as did Pitt. In truth, every one seems to have secretly 
hated or despised him, or both; a melancholy reward for 
an industrious ministerial existence. But so great was 
his political influence that scarce any one could afford to 
say so. 

One minister was now, however, to display a rare 

1 Thackeray gives a different account of this interview and of that with 
Charles Yorke, we know not whence derived. The account in the text is that 
of Charles Yorke and Hardwicke themselves (Harris, iii. 29-34) and in part 
Bubb, on the authority of James Grenville (p. 340). 

23 341 



LORD CHATHAM 

courage, and to oppose both the King and his minister on 
a critical point. In the middle of August, after the con- 
versation with Hardwicke, the treaty of subsidy with 
Hesse-Cassel arrived for the necessary confirmations. 
When it came before Legge as Chancellor of the Exchequer, 
he, no doubt with the connivance of Pitt, flatly refused 
his signature. Newcastle had always distrusted Legge, 
as, indeed, he distrusted everybody, and had given him 
the seals of the Exchequer with great reluctance. He 
was now aghast. War was imminent; the King would 
soon return with his pockets full of odious treaties of 
subsidy; Fox was still a malcontent; Legge was in open 
revolt; it was evident that he must face the formidable 
interview with Pitt. So he expressed the necessary wish, 
though one may guess his reluctance, and Pitt saw the 
Duke on September 2 (1755) for two hours and a half. 
The record of this interview is contained in a long letter 
from Newcastle to Hardwicke, 1 couched in the quavering 
notes of a distracted Minister. It begins with a wail of 
despair, the reluctant acknowledgment of the paramount 
importance of Pitt. ' I never sat down to write to your 
lordship with more melancholy apprehensions for the 
Publick than at present. I see nothing but confusion 
and it is beyond me to point out a remedy.' 

This was the result of Pitt's verbal refusal to join him, 
made by a Minister who held the great mass of the House 
of Commons in the hollow of his hand, who clung to office 
as to life and yet, though he knew Pitt was indispensable 
to its retention, would not once more, as in 1746, face his 
Sovereign and say so. Nothing can better illustrate the 
trembling plank on which the Duke was content to walk, 
wavering and helpless, depending only on Hardwicke 's 

1 Newcastle to Hardwicke, Sept. 3, 1755. Add. MSS. 32858. See too 
Orford, ii. 40. 

342 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

counsel and his own jobs. He did not dare face the King, 
he was bullied by the disorderly chiefs in the House of 
Commons, and he was always chaffering, but always afraid. 
So he and his like are satisfied to bear the yoke for the 
semblance of power. 

All began smoothly between Pitt and the Duke, all was 
apparently open, friendly, and civil; but when Newcastle 
referred to the conversation with Hardwicke, he was taken 
aback by finding that Pitt declared that nothing had passed 
that was material. He thus compelled Newcastle to re- 
capitulate the points of policy, no doubt for purposes of 
comparison. 

So the Duke had to state that the eve of the King's 
departure had been too troubled to lay Pitt's claim before 
his Majesty; for an address against the journey had been 
threatened in the House of Commons and actually pro- 
posed in the House of Lords. But that when alarming 
events had happened in America, Hardwicke and he had 
represented to the King the urgent necessity of forming a 
system in the House of Commons, which means, it may be 
presumed, abandoning the plan of conducting the House 
without a leader, and of enlisting Pitt as an active Minister 
there. That thereupon the King had graciously expressed 
his readiness to admit Pitt to his Cabinet. Pitt received 
this offer coolly, and proceeded at once to larger issues. 

As to the King's voyage he spoke with unsparing 
candour. The King had nearly ruined himself by his 
unpardonable departure to Hanover at such a crisis. He 
should only have been allowed to go there over the dead 
bodies of his people. ' A King abroad at this time, without 
one man about him that has an English heart, and only 
returning to bring home a packet of subsidies.' 

Of course, he proceeded to say with scarcely disguised 
sarcasm, the King's countenance was more to him than 

343 



LORD CHATHAM 

any other consideration. But if it was expected that he 
should take an active and efficient part in Parliament he 
must observe that a mere summons to the Cabinet would 
not be sufficient. In his present office he could silently 
acquiesce in ministerial measures. But activity could only 
be exercised in a responsible situation. 

Then he took a line which was clear, bold, and states- 
manlike. The whole machinery of the House of Commons 
was, he said, paralysed by the plan of leaving it without a 
responsible minister. That plan must be abandoned. The 
House could not perform its proper functions without a 
responsible minister, even though a subordinate one, who 
should have access to the Sovereign and to the royal con- 
fidence. For that purpose the leader or agent must have 
a responsible office of advice as well as of execution. ' That 
was the distinction he made throughout his whole con- 
versation. He would support the measures which he 
himself had advised, but would not like a lawyer talk 
from a brief. That it was better plainly to tell me so at 
first.' 

This surely was no inordinate claim from indisputably 
the first member of the House of Commons, whom the King 
had kept at bay for so many years, and to keep whom still 
in subjection every possible manceuvre, childish or cunning, 
was being adopted. ' Why, ' said he bluntly to Newcastle, 
' cannot you bring yourself to part with some of your sole 
power?' This of course produced voluble asseverations 
from the Duke. Sole power! What an idea! He had no 
conception of what Pitt could mean. He was in his present 
place, not by his own choice, far from it! but by the King's 
command, and, though he was devoted to the King, he 
would retire to-morrow if he was distasteful to the House 
of Commons. (This was a safe promise, for, as we have 
seen, the House of Commons was with but few exceptions 

344 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

at his absolute disposal.) Pitt replied that he himself 
had no objections to a Peer as First Lord of the Treasury, 
but there must be men of ability and responsibility in the 
House of Commons, a Secretary of State and a Chancellor 
of the Exchequer, that they must be sufficiently supported, 
and they must have access to the Crown, not a nominal, 
but an habitual, free, familiar access. In speaking of the 
Chancellor of the Exchequer he burst out into so en- 
thusiastic a eulogy of Legge, 'the child, and deservedly 
the favourite child of the Whigs,' that Newcastle sus- 
pected that all this was concerted between his rebellious 
Chancellor of the Exchequer and his insubordinate Pay- 
master. 

Pitt and the Duke next proceeded to analyse their own 
expressions; a task which the statesmen of that day seem 
to have avoided, to our detriment, as much as possible. 
Newcastle had spoken of the proposed seat in the Cabinet 
as a designation. 'What did this mean?' asked Pitt. 
'Did it mean the seals of Secretary of State, though not 
immediately?' The Duke was obliged to shuffle out, for 
in truth he had no power to promise any such thing. 
Designation only meant that the seat in the Cabinet 
would design him as the King's man of confidence. ' Then 
the Secretaryship of State is not intended,' was the fierce 
rejoinder. The Duke replied that he was not authorised to 
offer more than a seat in the Cabinet. If, rejoined Pitt, 
'the Secretaryships of State are to remain as they are, 
there is an end of any question of my giving active support 
to the Government in the House of Commons.' 

They had arrived at an impassable barrier, Pitt would 
take nothing but the seals which the King would not give 
him, and Newcastle was determined not to force on another 
crisis with the King on account of Pitt; whom, in truth, 
he dreaded little less as a colleague than as a foe. So 

345 



LORD CHATHAM 

they turned to matters of public policy, 'and then,' writes 
the hapless minister, ' nothing can equal my astonishment 
and concern.' He tried Pitt first with the Hessian Treaty, 
and then with the Russian. For the Hessian Treaty the 
Duke characteristically urged every reason but the true 
one, and for the Russian that it was the fruit of four years 
of negotiation, and that it would seem strange to drop it 
now. But Pitt was obdurate. He would be no party 
to a system of subsidies. If the Duke of Devonshire 
attacked the Hessian subsidy in the House of Lords, as 
was his intention, Pitt would echo the attack in the House 
of Commons. If the Russian Treaty were dropped he might 
acquiesce in the Hessian from regard for the King; as, 
for the same reason, he would always speak with the ut- 
most respect of Hanover. But no consideration would 
make him support both, or a system of subsidies. It 
was his regard for the King, presumably, which impelled 
him to make a further suggestion, which Newcastle did 
not venture to transmit even to Hardwicke. Out of the 
fifteen millions sterling that the King was said to have 
saved why, asked Pitt, should he not give Hesse 100,000/., 
and Russia 150,000/., to be out of these bad bargains? 
Newcastle was driven to his usual resource of the Chan- 
cellor, and suggested a conference with him in the ensuing 
week. Pitt agreed to this with, we may presume, a shrug 
of the shoulders. 

Neither in truth expected anything from such a meet- 
ing, for the pleas and the powers had both been exhausted. 
Newcastle realised this, and ends his remarkable record of 
the conversation with a despairing glance at his own 
prospects. What was he to do? There were as usual 
three courses to pursue. The first, which he should in- 
finitely prefer, would be his own retirement. This is a 
common cant of ministers, and with Newcastle it was 

346 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

more than usually insincere. Fox, he said, might succeed 
him at the Treasury, and Pitt for a session at any rate 
would have to acquiesce. The second would be for New- 
castle, remaining First Minister, to throw himself into the 
arms of the Pitt group, with Pitt as Secretary of State 
and Legge at the Exchequer. But the King would never 
hear of this. Newcastle puts it significantly thus : ' Whether 
this is in any shape practicable, I leave to your Lordship 
and all who know the King to determine.' The third 
course was the one adopted, ' to accept Mr. Fox's proposal, 
made by my Lord Granville,' the first allusion that we 
have to this particular negotiation. Fox was to be the real, 
efficient, and trusted leader of the House of Commons. 
But there must be conditions. Cumberland, the patron of 
Fox, must give his support, so must Devonshire and 
Hartington. There must be a new Chancellor of the 
Exchequer, and Fox must act cordially with the person 
whom the King might appoint to that office. Murray, and 
indeed every one, must put their shoulders to the wheel and 
exert themselves on behalf of the Administration. Lastly, 
it might be necessary to take in the venal but inevitable 
Bubb. 

Hardwicke answered Newcastle's report without a 
moment's delay, in a shrewd letter. 1 His first remark 
was that Pitt had taken much higher ground with the 
Duke than with him, perhaps because the bad news from 
the Ohio had made the Paymaster deem himself more 
valuable and necessary. He doubted whether the praises 
of Legge were sincere; they were probably intended to 
indicate a closer connection between them than really 
existed. But Hardwicke went straight to the two main 
points. The first was the general principle that the King 
must have a recognised Minister, what he called oddly 

» Add. MSS. 32858. 
347 



LORD CHATHAM 

enough 'a Minister with the King ' in the House of Commons. 
The other question was whether Pitt should be Secretary 
of State. 

As to the first, if the minister is to be subordinate, 
that is, not the Premier, he sees no great harm in it. ' For 
I have long been convinced,' continues the sagacious man, 
'that whoever your Grace shall make use of as your first 
man and man of confidence in the House of Commons, 
you will find it necessary, if he be a man of reputation 
and ability accompanied with the ambition naturally 
incident to such a character, I say under those circum- 
stances, your Grace will find it necessary to invest him 
with more power than, from the beginning, you thought 
fit to impart either to Mr. Legge or Sir Thomas Robinson.' 

From this we may gather that the Chancellor had never 
believed in the plan of a leaderless House of Commons. 
How indeed could he, as a man of sense, much more as a 
man of rare capacity? Such a plan could only be deemed 
possible by an alien King and a mountebank minister. As 
to the personal point, Hardwicke is not less acute. Pitt, 
he declares, has stiffened his demand since their interview. 
Pitt, he is convinced, intended to draw from the Duke a 
promise that it should be made a point with the King that 
he should be made Secretary of State within a given time; 
and so, when he failed in this, he proceeded to discuss 
measures in a more peremptory tone than he would other- 
wise have employed. 

'Now,' says Hardwicke, 'this comes to a point which 
you and I have often discussed together. Whether you can 
think it right or bring yourself to declare to him that you 
really wish him in the Secretary 's office, and will in earnest 
recommend him to the King on that foot.' 

This inestimable sentence throws a flood of light on 
Newcastle's professions to Pitt, and on the reality of the 

348 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

efforts that Newcastle had employed to soften the King. 
It is clear, we think, from this secret utterance that New- 
castle had been sincere in neither case. 

Hardwicke urges that the Duke should close with Pitt. 
He thinks that if Newcastle were loyally to give this assur- 
ance Pitt ' would close and take his active part immediately . ' 
Without this he is sure that Pitt believes ' that the inten- 
tion is to have the use of his talents without gratifying his 
ambition.' In writing this Hardwicke of course knew, as 
Newcastle knew, that Pitt's apprehension was well founded. 
' My poor opinion,' continues the Chancellor, ' is that without 
it all further meetings and pourparlers with this gentleman 
will be vain. Your heart can only dictate to you whether 
you should do it or not.' 1 Justly distrusting the Duke's 
heart, the Chancellor proceeds to appeal to his instincts. 
He discards, of course, the idea of Newcastle's resignation. 
A friend, consulted on such a point, rarely deems it decent 
to do otherwise; certainly no confidant of Newcastle's could 
have done so and retained his intimacy. 

As to relying on Pitt and Legge, he agrees that nothing 
but the pressure of necessity could make the King adopt 
this course. Of course he does riot say that the Duke could 
at any moment bring about this pressure, though that no 
doubt was the case. Newcastle, by his Parliamentary 
influence, could always produce a deadlock, as was soon to 
be proved. But Newcastle could, thinks Hardwicke, have 
Pitt without Legge. If Pitt had the seals he would not 
insist on Legge. 

The third course is that urged by Granville : to take Fox 
on Granville's conditions, which we may safely presume to 
have been those afterwards adopted. Hardwicke insinuates 
objections. Fox has the strong protection of Cumberland 
and the personal inclination of the King, but his election 

1 These two sentences are transposed for the sake of clearness. 

349 



LORD CHATHAM 

will be profoundly distasteful to Leicester House. Pitt, on 
the other hand, has ' no support at Court, and the personal 
disinclination of the King. He must therefore probably 
depend, at least for a good while upon those who bring him 
thither. ' Then comes the sentence about Fox and Leicester 
House which conveys a hint that Pitt, on the contrary, is 
well there. It is impossible to be more adroit. Hardwicke 
knew that Newcastle was fully aware that he hated Fox, 
and so put his objections in this indirect and skilful way. 
He failed, probably because Newcastle felt that to accept 
Fox would at any rate not necessitate a critical strug- 
gle with the King, and that Fox himself was more mal- 
leable. 

Of all strange confidants it was Bubb whom Pitt, on 
leaving Newcastle, proceeded to take into his inmost coun- 
sels. There are always parasites of this kind in politics, 
universally mistrusted, and yet constantly taken into con- 
fidence on grounds of convenience. Always sympathetic, 
always warm, always ready to betray at the first symptom 
of personal advantage, they are nevertheless useful parts of 
the political machine, and not so contemptible as might 
appear. They profess little, they deceive nobody except 
for a fleeting moment, and they are employed, with full 
knowledge of their character, to sound others and report 
the result, to suggest from their own base experience, to 
bring statesmen into relation with necessary people, and do 
the work with which statesmen will not soil their hands. 
But they are perilous and slippery agents, they attract in 
the warmth of the moment excessive confidence, and while 
these indiscretions are still ringing in their ears they are 
already in the tents of the enemy. Still, such as they are, 
they will always exist, and always be utilised, for they are 
part of the fatality of politics. 

So to Bubb Pitt betook himself on the day after that on 

35o 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

which he had seen Newcastle, and gave a spirited account 
of the interview. He then spoke fully of his relations with 
Fox, in which really lay the key to the situation. He wished 
well to Mr. Fox, he did not complain of him, but he could 
not act with him ; they could not co-operate because they 
were not on the same ground. Fox was not independent 
(sui juris) , but he was. He had been ready during the last 
session to go all lengths against the Duke of Newcastle ; but 
when it came to the pinch Fox always failed him (under the 
constraint, it may be presumed, of the Duke of Cumber- 
land). Fox had risen on his shoulders; 1 he did not blame 
him for it. Fox had taken the smooth part, and left him 
the brunt; he did not complain. Fox, too, lived with his 
greatest enemies, Carteret, Stone, and Murray. And New- 
castle had told him that Fox had recently offered himself 
to his Grace. Bubb declared that this was false, to his 
knowledge. Pitt replied that no one knew better than 
himself how great a liar Newcastle could be, and that if Fox 
denied this he should readily take his word against the 
Duke's. But all that he had recapitulated showed how 
impossible it was for two men to act together who stood on 
so different a footing as Fox and himself. 

Bubb now scented business of the kind to which he 
himself was addicted, and broke in with, 'As we who are 
to unite in this attack are to part no more,' 2 it would be 
proper to think what was to be held out to the confederates 
if they succeeded. 

Pitt declined to enter into this premature traffic, 'it 
would look too like a faction, there was no county in it ' ; 
but expressed himself, in the fashion of the day, with 
warmth and confidence as to Bubb himself. He thought 
Bubb of the greatest consequence; nothing was too good 
for such a man; no one was more listened to in the House 

1 Italics ours. 2 lb. 

351 



LORD CHATHAM 

and in the country. He wished to be connected with Bubb 
in the strictest sense politically, as he already was by 
marriage. 1 

Bubb demurely records these confidences, and was left 
happy; glad to find, as he writes, that he should receive 
such support in an opposition which, on patriotic and con- 
scientious grounds, he must have pursued even had he stood 
alone. 2 

Once more we have to deplore the hapless destinies of 
political alliance and of Parliamentary twins, united in 
bonds of principle, who are to part no more. This conver- 
sation took place on September 3 (1755). On November 20 
Pitt was dismissed, because of his adherence to the virtuous 
course which Bubb had resolved to pursue without flinch- 
ing, even if isolated, with or without Pitt. Bubb records 
the removal in a terse entry of his diary, and the next, not 
less terse, records his acceptance of a lucrative post tendered 
by Newcastle. History has to note some such incidents, 
but we know of none so cynically and complacently narrated 
by the renegade himself. 

Hardwicke made one last desperate effort to move Pitt, 
but without success. He writes to Newcastle on September 
15 (1755): 'I have had a long conversation with the gentle- 
man your Grace knows, but with little effect. I talked very 
fully and strongly to him upon every part of the case, both 
as to persons and measures. He made great professions of 
his regard and firm attachment to your Grace and me, but 
adhered to his negative. He puts that negative upon two 
things : His objections to the two treaties of subsidy .... 
his other objection arose from Mr. F., with whom he de- 
clared he could not act.' 3 

1 There was some family connection between Bubb and the Grenvilles, 
though it is not easy to trace. Bubb's property indeed, to his disgust, was 
entailed on Temple. 

2 Bubb, 370. 3 Add. MSS. 32859, f. 86. 

35 2 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

On this scene, coming more and more into prominence 
as the King became older, and as the Prince of Wales, or 
rather Bute and his clique, waxed bolder, appears the mys- 
terious and elusive influence of Leicester House. It is 
difficult to trace or measure this combination, except in the 
naked fact of an old King and a young heir, nor is it easy 
to trace the connection of Pitt with this party. Every 
movement in Leicester House was jealously watched by the 
politicians, much as a late Sultan is said to have tracked 
the movements of the least menial of his dethroned and 
secluded predecessor. We read of the Princess being stirred 
to wrath by her father-in-law's project of marrying her son 
to the daughter, supposed to be active and ambitious, of a 
woman she detested. Then there is the suspicion that the 
Heir Apparent was surrounded by persons who were more 
or less Jacobite, Bute himself having, it was presumed, 
Jacobite leanings. But the King at once desisted with rare 
good sense from any idea of the projected marriage, though 
no doubt it would have given him pleasure. And the 
danger of an Hanoverian sovereign becoming a Jacobite 
under any influence seems too fantastic for a pantomime. 
The real apprehension was no doubt that Leicester House 
might shake off the domination and destroy the long monop- 
oly of the Whigs, as indeed it eventually did. And certainly 
Leicester House, with the throne full in view, was becoming 
more and more inclined to assert itself. Human nature 
and family relations had, as usual in such cases, much to 
do with the matter. The Hanoverian Kings did not love 
their heirs apparent. George the First hated his, but he 
had no other son to love, and indeed little capacity for 
loving, except mistresses who found favour with no one 
else. George the Second hated his with a peculiar hatred, 
and was thus able to devote what fatherly affection he had 
to give to his second son, the Duke of Cumberland. These 

353 



LORD CHATHAM 

parental preferences, however justifiable, do not tend to 
affection between sons. And so there was no love lost 
between Prince Frederick and his family on the one side, 
and Duke William on the other. These feelings, as is 
usually the case, survived when Frederick died, with in- 
creasing intensity between the widow and her brother-in- 
law. She saw him on the right hand of the King, enjoying 
all his confidence, as was natural, and herself and her bashful 
son of no account ; so that a new jealousy was added to the 
original rancour. 

Understanding these facts, we are able to follow the 
course of Pitt. Fox was essentially the Duke of Cumber- 
land's man, and so by the force of circumstances, Pitt 
became allied, but not at this moment closely allied, to 
Leicester House. He had been a friend and servant of the 
dead Prince of Wales, then had quarrelled with him, but 
the original brand was not altogether effaced. Now he was 
the one champion whom the faction of the late Heir Ap- 
parent could adopt; and so the politicians began to see 
behind Pitt the influence of the coming King, his mother, 
and their favourite. Thus, when Newcastle had to make 
the option between Fox and Pitt, it was not merely the 
choice between two rival orators, but between two rival 
Courts, the Old and the New. We may be sure that no 
element in this business was more essentially present to the 
Minister's mind. 

All this seems petty but essential; but all was petty 
then, as is proved by the mere fact of Newcastle being at 
the head of the ministry and master of the House of Com- 
mons ; and it is all essential to the reader who would under- 
stand the history of those times, because the complication 
of these byways and intrigues is so extreme. There was 
the King with Lady Yarmouth and Cumberland; there 
were Newcastle and Hardwicke, with the House of Com- 

354 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

mons at their feet, and anxious to remain at their feet if 
that were possible; there was the influence of Cumberland 
apart from the King, and represented by Fox; there was 
Bedford, powerful from his property and connections, with 
a clique hungry for office ; there was Pitt with his Grenville 
relations, who were ready to give him their support, but 
not less ready to withdraw it if something better should 
offer. And around and below these was the great shifting 
mass of politicians by profession and cupidity, the parlia- 
mentary Zoroastrians, who worshipped the rising sun, when 
they could discern it; the sun which should shed upon 
them office, salary, and titles; striving, sweating, cringing, 
as Bubb, the most shameless of them all, emphasises in 
capital letters, 'and all for quarter-day.' It was 
through this scene of confusion and intrigue that Pitt had 
to thread his way, not very scrupulously ; for he had always 
lived in this society, had lost whatever thin illusions he had 
ever possessed, and followed the clues which his experience 
had taught him to prize. He played the game. 

The meeting of Parliament took place two months after- Nov. i 3 , nss 
wards and that period was spent by Newcastle and Hard- 
wicke in arranging to discard Pitt and Legge, and to lean 
on Cumberland and Fox. Newcastle did not yield to 
Fox without reluctance, for it was, in Pitt's words, part- 
ing with some of his sole power. In his helplessness and 
despair he even offered to cede his place to Granville, who 
as Carteret had been his most detested bugbear, but who 
had now subsided into a quiescent President of the Council. 
Granville refused with a laugh, and preferred to conduct 
the negotiation with Fox. Fox had to him the merit of 
keeping out Pitt, whose former denunciations he had neither 
forgotten nor forgiven. So he had first endeavoured to 
inspire Murray to face, and now Fox to supplant Pitt. 
With a flash of his old diplomacy he was able to bring 

355 



LORD CHATHAM 

together the two mistrustful parties, on terms which New- 
castle had curtly refused in the first insolence of his power, 
but which now, at the instance of Hardwicke as we have 
seen, he had to concede. The insane plan of a leaderless 
House of Commons, left like sheep on a barren moor, owned 
by an absentee Duke secluded in the Treasury, was to be 
abandoned. Fox was to be Secretary of State, leader of 
the House of Commons in name and in fact, and what was 
far more than either, he was authorised to announce that he 
represented the full influence of the King in the House 'to 
help or to hurt. ' When the two shepherds, the old and the 
new, burning with mutual hatred and distrust, met to ratify 
the conditions, Fox suggested^ sardonically that it would be 
best that this should be the last time on which they should 
meet to agree, that there should be a final settlement, or 
none at all, meaning that it should be honest and complete. 
Newcastle, no doubt with a wry face, agreed. 'Then,' said 
Fox, 'it shall be so'; though indeed it was not. Fox 
stipulated for the admission or promotion of five persons, 
the only memorable ones of whom were George Selwyn, 
whose lovable and humorous personality has survived that 
of many more eminent contemporaries, and Hamilton, who 
is the only man, except the less-known Hawkins, who is 
remembered by a single speech. Chesterfield, on hearing 
of the reconstitution of the ministry, observed with his 
habitual shrewdness that Newcastle had turned out every- 
body else and had now turned himself out. Fox at once 
repented of his adhesion, for Stone, Newcastle's confidant, 
informed him that had he not joined them the ministry 
would have instantly resigned. 1 But now he had to con- 
tent himself with negotiating through Rigby with the 
Bedford group, which he hoped to bring into office for the 
purpose of wrecking the administration. 

1 Orford, ii. 45. 
356 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

Robinson made less than no difficulties in accommo- 
dating himself to the new pretensions. He only yearned 
to return to the Great Wardrobe of which he had been 
Master. And so with a pension of 2000/. a year, fixed upon 
luckless Ireland, he vanishes into space, with the natural 
remark that he had never looked on his seven children with 
so much satisfaction as on the completion of these domestic 
arrangements. 

24 



LORD CHATHAM 



T 



CHAPTER XIX 

'HIS blank though important space in the life of Pitt 
himself seems favourable for picking up a few threads 
which had to be dropped in the narrative of his negotia- 
tions with Newcastle. 

After the baiting to which Robinson had been subjected 
in the first days of the session he disappeared from debate ; 
and Fox, then in close negotiation for a seat in the Cabinet, 
represented the Government in the Commons, and turned 
a deaf ear to the proposal that he should join Pitt in a 
combined attack on Newcastle. Fox's game, it will be seen, 
was not calculated to win the confidence of Pitt, to whom, 
however, during the session, he showed marked courtesy 
on the one hand, while negotiating with the Duke on the 
other. 
Feb. 26, i7ss The Lord Advocate had introduced a Bill continuing 
for a further period the provisions passed after the ris- 
ing of 1745 which had temporarily placed the tenure 
of sheriff -deputyships at the King's pleasure instead of for 
life as before. This seems to have raised an animated 
debate, memorable to us as having produced two fine 
speeches from Pitt, which Horace Walpole alone mentions, 
and of which he gives a spirited sketch. It is only possible 
to give Walpole's record in his own words, as there is no 
other. Pitt spoke in answer to Murray (who, by-the-by, 
speaking in defence of the Bill, had said that there was not 
a single Jacobite left in Scotland) 'with great fire, in one of 
his best worded and most spirited declarations for liberty, 

358 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

but which, like others of his fine orations, cannot be deliv- 
ered adequately without his own language; nor will they 
appear so cold to the reader as they even do to myself, 
when I attempt to sketch them, and cannot forget with 
what soul and grace they were uttered. He did not directly 
oppose, but wished rather to send the Bill to the Committee, 
to see how it could be amended. He was glad that Murray 
would defend the King, only with a salve to the rights of 
the Revolution; he commended his abilities, but tortured 
him on his distinctions and refinements. He himself had 
more scruples ; it might be a Whig delicacy — but even that 
is a solid principle. He had more dread of arbitrary power 
dressing itself in the long robe, than even of military power. 
When master principles are concerned, he dreaded accuracy 
of distinction : he feared that sort of reasoning : if you class 
everything, you will soon reduce everything into a particu- 
lar; you will then lose great general maxims. Gentlemen 
may analyse a question till it is lost. If I can show him, 
says Murray, that it is not my Lord Judge, but Mr. Judge, 

I have got him into a class. For his part, could he be drawn 
to violate liberty, it should be regnandi causa, for this 
King's reigning. He would not recur for precedents to the 
diabolic divans of the second Charles and James ; he did not 
date his principles of the liberty of this country from the 
Revolution; they are eternal rights; and when God said, 

II let justice be justice," He made it independent. The Act 
of Parliament that you are going to repeal is a proof of the 
importance of the Sheriffs-depute: formerly they were in- 
struments of tyranny. Why is this attempted? is it to 
make Mr. Pelham more regretted? He would have been 
tender of cramming down the throats of the people what 
they are averse to swallow. Whig and Minister were con- 
juncts he always wished to see. He deprecated (sic) those, 
who had more weight than himself in the Administration, to 

359 



LORD CHATHAM 

drop this ; or besought that they would take it for any term 
that may comprehend the King's life; for seven years, for 
fourteen, though he was not disposed to weigh things 
in such golden scales.' The reader must make of this what 
he will. 

Fox said ' that he was undetermined, and would reserve 
himself for the Committee; that he only spoke now, to 
show it was not crammed down his throat; which was in 
no man's power to do. That in the Committee he would 
be free, which he feared Pitt had not left it in his own power 
to be, so well he had spoken on one side. That he rever- 
enced liberty and Pitt, because nobody could speak so well 
on its behalf.' 1 

The Bill came up again a few days afterwards, and we 
find Pitt again attacking it, and Fox apparently evading a 
contest with him. We are once more thrown back on 
Walpole's account. 'Pitt talked on the harmony of the 
day, and wished that Fox had omitted anything that looked 
like levity on this great principle. That the Ministry giving 
up the durante bene placito was an instance of moderation. 
That two points of the Debate had affected him with 
sensible pleasure — the admission that judicature ought to be 
free, and the universal zeal to strengthen the King's hands. 
That liberty was the best loyalty ; that giving extraordinary 
powers to the Crown was so many repeals of the Act of 
Settlement. Fox said shortly, that if he had honoured the 
fire of liberty, he now honoured the smoke. ' 2 

These arguments are not easy to follow,, so the only 
faithful course seems to be to give the actual record. 

Meanwhile it is necessary for a moment to peer outside, 
and take note of the world so far, and only so far, as it 
affects the life of Pitt; for the clouds of war were gathering 
fast. The Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle was only an armed 

1 Orford, ii. 7-9. i lb. ii. 17. 

360 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

truce; the cupidities and resentments which it had checked 
for the moment were still active, though mute. With two 
such characters as Frederick and Maria Theresa matched 
against each other, it was evident that Silesia would never 
be surrendered or abandoned without another deadly strug- 
gle. Moreover, half unconsciously, the two secular rivals, 
France and Britain, were drifting into a contest for suprem- 
acy over half the globe, to settle the question as to which 
should become the first colonising power of the world. 
Hostilities in India and in North America were always 
smouldering, and the arrangements of Aix-la-Chapelle had 
not extended to either region. The treaty had in no way 
checked the desperate war carried on in India between the 
English and French Companies, between Clive and Dupleix. 
That was presently closed for the moment by a provisional 
treaty signed on the spot in January, 1755. In America 
the scene was even more poignant. There without any 
declaration of war, in a formal and legal state of peace, 
hostilities were carried on, openly and yet treacherously, by 
incursions connived at by the French Government. And 
as if to add an additional horror to these sinister operations, 
they were accompanied by all the unspeakable barbarities 
of Indian warfare, the cold-blooded murder of men, women 
and children, rewards from the European governors for the 
scalps thus obtained, and by open cannibalism. 1 Christian 
missionaries were not ashamed to hound on these savages 
to murder, torture, and rapine; nay, their professed con- 
verts 2 were sometimes the keenest in butchery. For religious 
fanaticism imparted an ignorant zeal to the barbarous 
combatants, who were taught, it is said, that Christ was a 
Frenchman crucified by the English. The claim that the 
King of France was the eldest son of the Church was con- 
strued into a much more literal interpretation of divine 

1 'Montcalm and Wolfe,' i. 483. 2 lb. i. 510. 

361 



LORD CHATHAM 

origin. 1 There was in fact no element of atrocity wanting 
to this war, which was not a war ; blasphemy, murder, out- 
rage, arson, rape, torture were all employed under the pure 
white banner with its golden lilies. Parkman, the historian 
of these operations, does not record the like of the British. 
But this is not to affirm there were no reprisals. For war 
carried on in this fashion and by the employment of savages 
can scarcely be one-sided in its barbarities. 

But apart from the perfidious ambitions of govern- 
ments and the predatory lusts of savages, there could not 
be peace in America, nor in effect had there been since the 
settlement of Utrecht. Boundaries in that tractless con- 
tinent were vague, and constantly overstepped. The 
proper limits of Nova Scotia, and the demarcation between 
Canada and New England, were subjects of acute contro- 
versy. Under such circumstances both parties plant out- 
posts in disputed territories, and both attempt to dislodge 
each other. French officers headed exploring parties, 
annexing vast territories by the simple expedient of nailing 
to a tree-trunk a tin plate stamped with the arms of France, 
and burying at the root a leaden tablet recording that 
possession had thus been taken. But there were other 
operations much less bloodless and futile. One of these 
petty engagements survives in history because it marks the 
July 4 . 1754 first appearance of Washington, compelled in 1754 to 
celebrate the Fourth of July by a surrender to the French, 
who had surrounded him in superior numbers ; and because 
it was the commencement of open but not declared warfare 
between the British and the French. Both nations now 
determined to send out reinforcements. ' In a moment, ' 
says Walpole, 'the Duke of Newcastle assumed the hero, 
and breathed nothing but military operations; he and the 
Chancellor held councils of war; none of the ministers ex- 

1 Montcalm and Wolfe, i. 54, 66. 
362 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

cept Lord Holderness were admitted inside their tent.' 
With some discount forWalpole's malicious pleasantry, the 
picture, humorous enough to us, must have filled men like 
Pitt with the darkest misgivings. Pitt, as we have seen, 
had once been accidentally admitted into the tent and 
taken into confidence. He must have left it with the feel- 
ing that the destinies of the Empire were in peril so long 
as Newcastle was at the helm. A giant conflict for the 
supremacy of the world was preparing, and Newcastle was 
in charge of Great Britain. It was enough to give the brav- 
est patriot a qualm. Nor were the military preparations Jan. nss 
less deplorable. Braddock was sent out at the new year 
with a plan of campaign prepared by Cumberland. Cum- 
berland on Braddock was a combination which might make 
the stoutest heart in England quail. Cumberland, who had 
lost every battle but the one-sided affray of Culloden, was 
the brain to devise. Braddock, a brutal soldier of parade 
experience, whose only warfare had been in Hyde Park 
or Hounslow, was the hand to execute. Braddock took 
his troops through the American bush as if they were 
marching from London to Windsor, and was annihilated July 9 , 175s 
ten miles from the French stronghold, Fort Duquesne, 
where now smokes toiling Pittsburg. British troops then 
first faced the most formidable of adversaries, an invisible 
foe. They advanced boldly, cheering and singing 'God 
save the King.' But they found that they were mere 
targets for a host of concealed sharpshooters. Behind 
every tree and rock there lurked a musket. At last they 
broke ranks and huddled into confusion. ' We would fight,' 
they answered their officers, ' if we could see anybody to 
fight with. ' Some survivors declare that they had not seen 
a single Indian. Others were not so fortunate. Twelve 
unhappy persons were tortured and burned alive by the 
savage allies of the French. Braddock was mortally wound- 

363 



LORD CHATHAM 

ed, and died after a long silence, broken only by the one 
pathetic question, 'Who would have thought it?' 1 His 
papers fell into the hands of the French and swelled the in- 
dictment with which they declared war. 2 This evil news 
arrived in England at the end of August, and no doubt 
precipitated Newcastle's attempt to come to terms with 
Pitt. 

Three months after the departure of Braddock, the 
French in alarm fitted out a fleet of reinforcement, which 
sailed at the end of April, just as George II. was leaving 
his kingdom for his electorate, amid the scarce veiled in- 
dignation of his British subjects. The moment was critical, 
the King was old, his heir was young, the French were 
making great warlike preparations, every circumstance 
pointed to the grave impropriety of the departure. But 
the King was obdurate to all remonstrance. Not only was 
Hanover his home, he was also anxious to negotiate treaties 
of subsidy for its protection ; treaties which were more con- 
veniently signed away from Great Britain; that country 
being only required to endorse them in order to furnish 
the necessary supplies. 

When it was certain that the French fleet was destined 
for America, Admiral Boscawen was dispatched with a 
squadron to intercept it. Boscawen had eleven ships of 
the line and one frigate, the French fleet consisted of eigh- 
teen ships, eight of which were lightly armed as transports. 
The two armaments came into collision at the mouth of 
1755 the St. Lawrence on June 7. Three French ships came 
into conflict with three British ships under Captain Howe. 
The French commander sent to ask ' Is it peace or war ? ' 
Lord Howe replied that he must ask his admiral, who 
replied 'War.' Thereupon Howe attacked and captured 
two of the enemy, but to the mortification of the British 

» 'Montcalm & Wolfe,' i. 214-226. 2 Souvenirs de Moreau,i.62. 

364 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

the bulk of the French fleet got safely into Louisbourg; 
then a Gibraltar, now a lonely pasture beaten by the surf. 

During all this year attempts had been made by nego- 
tiation in London between Mirepoix, the French Ambas- 
sador, and Newcastle, to delimit the territories in dispute, 
but at the news of this conflict Mirepoix left London at 
once. Nevertheless the French behaved with signal plac- 
ability ; they even released the Blandford man-of-war, which 
they had captured; and there was at present no formal 
declaration of open hostility. For Louis XV. and his 
mistress did not desire war with Great Britain, nor were 
they ready for it. A council was held at Compiegne at 
which the opinion of Noailles prevailed. That was to suffer 
and endure, so as to attract the sympathy of all Europe 
against Britain ; only to declare war when it was abundantly 
proved to be inevitable; then to limit the operations to the 
sea ; and not to be lured into any warfare on the continent 
of Europe. 1 It was the Government of Newcastle that 
moved towards hostilities. Our Admiralty behaved with 
great but perhaps lawless vigour. It issued letters of 
marque, and before the end of the year 300 French mer- 
chant ships and 6000 French seamen had been captured. 

War seemed now inevitable, although at earlier stages 
it might, we think, have been avoided without difficulty; 
and there began a general hunt for alliances, which soon 
developed into a complete reversal of former arrange- 
ments. Maria Theresa, thirsting for revenge, sought under 
the inspiration of Kaunitz a strict union with France and 
Russia. The tongue of Frederick, biting, uncontrolled, and 
especially venomous in dealing with the frailty of woman, 
did perhaps more than Austrian diplomacy to facilitate these 
arrangements; for the Empress Elizabeth and Madame de 
Pompadour were both stung to unrelenting animosity by 

1 Moreau, i. 58. 
365 



LORD CHATHAM 

Frederick's reckless ribaldry. Frederick, however, took the 
first step himself. While France was secretly carrying on 
negotiations with England, which continued to the end 
of 1755, and neglecting to renew her previous treaty with 
Prussia, which expired in May, 1756, Frederick signed 
with Great Britain, in January, 1756, the Treaty of West- 
minster, by which both parties guaranteed each other's 
possessions and bound themselves to take up arms against 
any power which should invade Germany. This instru- 
ment had the indirect but grave effect of neutralising the 
King's treaty with Russia for the defence of Hanover, for 
it precluded any foreign power from marching troops into 
Germany. The news of this agreement was received at 
Versailles with consternation and wrath. The French Court 
replied to it by the Treaty of Versailles (May 1, 1756), 
hurriedly concluded with Austria and extremely one-sided. 
France agreed to respect the Austrian Netherlands, from 
which she might have hoped for some compensation in case 
of success. Both parties agreed to guarantee each other's 
dominions, and a secret article, aimed at Prussia, made the 
compact more stringent. In August a treaty still more 
advantageous to Austria was concluded between the two 
Powers; but in this some frontier towns in the Austrian 
Netherlands, though not specified, were to be conceded 
to France, when Austria was once more in possession of 
Silesia and Glatz. 1 

It was believed in Europe that this counterbalancing 
treaty to that of Westminster ensured the peace of the Con- 
tinent. But the world did not yet know Frederick. He 
was crouching for a spring. Two circumstances impelled 
him. He had become aware through a corrupt Saxon clerk 
of a correspondence between Austria and Saxony concert- 
ing a vast confederacy against him. The second was this. 

1 Waddington. Louis XV. et le Renversement des Alliances, pp. 471-6. 

366 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

We have noticed the Russian and Hessian treaties of sub- 
sidy. That with Russia had been originally concluded 
with a view to operations against Frederick himself, 1 and 
to that purpose the Empress Elizabeth was determined 
that it should be confined. By a personal declaration 2 and 
by two resolutions of the Russian Senate 3 it was made clear 
that hostility to Frederick alone inspired the Russian share 
of the treaty. He saw the circle closing round him. Three 
outraged women were directing the forces of three Em- 
pires against him. He had nothing to rely upon but his 
own country, Britain, and himself. Cognizant of the 
plot against him, he determined to have the advantage 
of attack. Like a leopard he sprang upon Dresden. Be- 
fore the Saxons had well realised that war was impending 
he was at the throat of the electorate, and had seized the 
capital, the army, and the compromising papers which 
justified his action. This was the beginning of the world- 
wide struggle known as the Seven Years' War, and it 
occurred in September, 1756. 

This is all that is necessary for our story, a mere glimpse 
of the intrigues and rancours which were lashing all Europe 
into storm. We must now return to the parliamentary 
arena. 

On September 15, George II. deigned to return to his 175s 
British dominions, and on November 13 he opened his 
Parliament. Two circumstances were considered note- 
worthy in connection with the formal occasion. Fox, as 
leader of the House, rehearsed the Speech from the Throne, 
as was then the custom, at the Cockpit ; but the Chancellor 
of "the Exchequer, the Paymaster, and the Grenvilles were 
conspicuous by their absence. Fox, too, summoned his 
supporters by a note of the kind then, as now, customary, 

1 Raumer, Frederick II. and his Times, 227. 2 lb. 233. 

3 Carlyle, Frederick, iv. 509. 

367 



LORD CHATHAM 

but in terms which gave offence to the susceptible inde- 
pendence of members ; intimating that the King was about 
to make him Secretary of State, though not till after the 
first debate, 'which may be a warm one,' so that his seat 
might not be vacated until after the Address had been 
voted. He was also to take upon him ' the conduct of the 
House of Commons.' This last expression was animad- 
verted upon in Parliament, and Fox admitted that he 
should have said 'conduct of His Majesty's affairs in the 
House of Commons.' In these days, when 'leader of 
the House of Commons' is the recognised title of the prin- 
cipal Minister in the House, it is not without interest to 
notice this constitutional squeamishness. 

The King's Speech contained the following paragraph, 
which strikes the reader as something less than candid: — 

' With a sincere desire to preserve my people from the 
calamities of war, as well as to prevent, in the midst of 
these troubles, a general war from being lighted up in 
Europe, I have always been ready to accept reasonable and 
honourable terms of accommodation ; but none such have 
hitherto been proposed on the part of France. I have also 
confined my views and operations to hinder France from 
making new encroachments, or supporting those already 
made; to exert our right to a satisfaction for hostilities 
committed in a time of profound peace: and to disappoint 
such designs as, from various appearances and prepara- 
tions, there is reason to think, have been formed against 
my kingdoms and dominions. ' 

Members met to hear the Royal Speech in the electric 
condition which bodes a crisis. There had been a long 
political truce; but this was evidently about to come to an 
end. Ministers had to bear the burden of the Russian and 
Hessian treaties, which the Speech from the Throne com- 
mended to the attention of Parliament. War with France 

368 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

was impending; indeed, a French invasion was daily ex- 
pected. There was a new leader, and, consequently, a new 
opposition. Pitt was evidently prepared to launch thunder- 
bolts at the Administration. Leicester House was said to 
be behind him. There was an animating sense of conflict 
in the air. 

Once more the parliamentary history fails us, and dis- 
dains to record one of the most memorable passages in its 
annals; so once more we are thrown on the authority and 
the sketches of Walpole; sometimes brilliant, but more 
often confused and defective. 

The debate in the Commons lasted till near five in the 
morning, an hour then almost unprecedented. 

It was distinguished by that famous effort which gave 
Single-speech Hamilton his nickname. Walpole, in re- 
cording and eulogising it, says : ' You will ask, what could 
be beyond this? Nothing but what was beyond what ever 
was, and that was Pitt. ' Pitt, indeed, after sitting through 
the eleven hours of the debate, rose and delivered, with 
inimitable spirit and all the dramatic force that the greatest 
actor of his age could impart, a speech of an hour and a 
half, which contains his most famous figure, and which 
perhaps he never exceeded. 

'His eloquence,' says Walpole, 'like a torrent long ob- 
structed, burst forth with more commanding impetuosity.' 
For ten years he had been muzzled, and now he revelled in 
his freedom. ' He spoke at past one (in the morning) for 
an hour and thirty-five minutes. There was more humour, 
wit, vivacity, fine language, more boldness, — in short, more 
astonishing perfections, than even you who are used to him 
can conceive.' 

He ' surpassed himself, and then I need not tell you that 
he surpassed Cicero and Demosthenes. What a figure 
would they with their formal laboured cabinet orations 

3 6 9 



LORD CHATHAM 

make vis-a-vis his manly vivacity and dashing eloquence 
at one o'clock in the morning, after sitting in that heat for 
eleven hours!' 

This enthusiasm from the least enthusiastic of men adds 
to our regrets that so faint a memory of this dazzling speech 
remains. And yet perhaps we were wise to be grateful 
that we have only the description. It seems not impossible 
that the words taken down verbatim by some old parlia- 
mentary hand in the reporters' gallery would seem cold or 
tawdry without the soul and grace which animated them 
and which haunted Horace Walpole for long years after- 
wards. Some of the allusions which have been noted down 
seem forced, some of the bursts incoherent, some of the 
irony obscure. But those who heard it palpitated with 
emotion; they saw the divine fire of the orator, while pos- 
terity can only grope among the cold ashes for the burning 
fragments poured forth in the wrath of the eruption. 

' Haughty, defiant, conscious of injury, and of supreme 
abilities,' he offered a great contrast to Legge, who fought 
by his side with different weapons; for Legge was studi- 
ously moderate, deferential, and artful; 'gliding to revenge.' 
Yet Pitt himself began with expressions of veneration for 
the King, and of gratitude for 'late condescending goodness 
and gracious openings, ' alluding to the offer of a seat in the 
Cabinet. It was obvious from this that he did not 
mean the door of the Closet to be closed on him, or to try 
again to force it by attack. But, he continued, the very 
respect he felt for that august name made him deprecate 
the unconstitutional use made of it in this debate. 

Egmont had argued that we were to have the Hessian 
and Russian mercenaries to fall back upon in case our 
fleets were defeated. Why if that were so, asked Pitt, did 
we not hire of Russia ships rather than men ? The answer 
was simple: because ships could not defend Hanover. 

37o 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

Must we drain, he asked, presumably in obscure allusion 
to Russia, our last vital drop and send it to the North Pole? 
We had been told that Carthage was undone in spite of her 
navy. But that was not until she betook herself to land 
operations. Carthage, too, he added, pointing directly to 
the enterprises of Cumberland, had a Hannibal who would 
pass the Alps. We were told, too, that we must assist 
Hanover out of justice and gratitude. As to justice, there 
was a charter which barred any such consideration. Grat- 
itude was only in question if Hanover should be involved in 
anything which called down on her the resentment of France 
in consequence of any quarrel of ours. But, to speak 
plainly, these expressions were unparliamentary and un- 
constitutional. The King owed a duty to his people which 
should not be obscured by such phraseology. Our ances- 
tors would never have stooped to such adulation. 

Then he turned with the greatest contempt to Sir 
George Lyttelton: 'A gentleman near me has talked of 
writers on the law of Nations. But Nature is the best 
writer; she will teach us to be men and not to truckle to 
power. ' As he proceeded, he slowly swelled into his famous 
burst. 'I who am at a distance from the sanctum sanc- 
torum — I, who travel through a desert and am overwhelmed 
with mountains of obscurity — cannot so easily catch a 
gleam to direct me to the beauties of these negotiations. 
For there are parts of this Address which do not seem to 
come from the same quarter as the rest. I cannot unravel 
this mystery. But, yes !' he exclaimed with an air of sudden 
enlightenment, clapping his hand to his forehead, ' I too am 
now inspired. I am struck by a recollection. I remember 
at Lyons to have been taken to see the conflux of the Rhone 
and the Saone. The one is a gentle, feeble, languid stream, 
and, though languid, of no depth; the other a boisterous 
and impetuous torrent. Yet they meet at last. And long,' 

37i 



LORD CHATHAM 

he added, with bitter sarcasm, 'may they continue united, 
to the comfort of each other, and to the glory, honour, and 
security of this nation. ' 

This is all that we possess of this renowned flight, and in 
this faint form it does not strike one as particularly impres- 
sive. But the actual words of the orator were probably 
very different, and nothing can preserve for us the voice, 
the eye, the darting accent and the concentrated fire of 
delivery which imparted such tremendous force to the 
apostrophe. In any case, the effect was instant and pro- 
digious. After the debate Fox asked Pitt, 'Who is the 
Rhone?' Ts that a fair question?' answered Pitt, for no 
orator likes to be cross-examined about his metaphors. 
'Why,' rejoined Fox good-humouredly, 'as you have said 
so much that I did not wish to hear, you may tell me one 
thing that I want to hear. Am I the Rhone, or Lord Gran- 
ville?' 'You are Granville,' returned Pitt. He meant, of 
course, what was true, that Fox and Granville were now 
practically one, and one in opposition to himself. 

After this climax the notes of the remainder of the 
speech seem comparatively poor. ' By adopting these 
measures,' he urged, 'we are losing sight of our proper force, 
the Navy. It was the Navy which, by making us masters 
of Cape Breton in the last war, had secured the restoration 
of Flanders and the Barrier Fortresses. And yet even then 
we had had to conclude a bad peace. Moreover, bad as it 
was, our ministers had suffered such constant infractions of 
it that they would have been stoned in the streets had they 
not at last shown signs of resentment. And yet, even now, 
they seem to have already forgotten the cause in which they 
took up arms, for at present they are not acting on behalf 
of Britain. These treaties are not English measures, but 
Hanoverian. Are they indeed measures of prevention? 
Are they not rather measures of aggression and provocation ? 

37 2 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

Will they not irritate Prussia and light up a general war? 
If that be the result, I will follow to the death the authors of 
this policy, for this is the day that I hope will give a colour 
to my life. And yet I fear it is useless to try and stem the 
torrent. Ministers evidently mean a land war, and how 
preposterous a war. Hanover is their only base, for they 
cannot gain the alliance of the Dutch. I remember, every- 
body remembers, when you did force them to join you: all 
our misfortunes are due to those daring, wicked counsels (of 
Granville's) . Out of them sprung a ministry, ' he continued, 
referring to the forty-eight hours phantom of Pulteney and 
Carteret. ' I saw that ministry. In the morning it flour- 
ished. It was green at noon. By night it was cut down 
and forgotten.' What if a ministry should spring out of 
this subsidy? It is contended, moreover, that it will dis- 
honour the King to reject these treaties which he has con- 
cluded. But was not the treaty of Hanau transmitted to 
us in the same way and rejected here ? If these treaties are 
really a preventive measure, they are only preventive of 
Newcastle's retirement. 

Then he ridiculed Murray's elaborate compassion of the 
aged Sovereign. He too could appeal for commiseration of 
the King. He could picture him deprived of any honest 
counsel, spending his summer in his electorate, surrounded 
by affrighted Hanoverians, without any one near him to 
keep him in mind of the policy and interest of England, or 
of the fact that we cannot reverse the laws of Nature, and 
make Hanover other than an open, defenceless country. 
He too could foresee the day, within the next two years, 
when the King would be unable to sleep in St. James's; 
but that would be because his slumbers would be disturbed 
by the clamours of a bankrupt people. 

These are all the shreds that remain of this glorious 
rhapsody. It would perhaps be better that nothing had 

25 373 



LORD CHATHAM 

survived. Each student must try and reconstruct for him- 
self, like some rhetorical Owen, out of these poor bones the 
majestic structure of Pitt's famous speech. 

Fox replied with obvious languor and fatigue, and the 
division was taken between four and five. On the first 
question, that the words promising assistance to Hanover 
should be omitted, the supporters of the Government were 
311 to 105. On the second amendment, which obscurely 
questioned the policy of both treaties, the numbers were 
290 to 89. The faithful Commons were still able to be loyal 
to Newcastle. Against that pasteboard rock Pitt's billows 
broke in vain. 1 

Next day (November 15, 1755) Fox received the seals. 
Five days afterwards Pitt, Legge, and George Grenville 
were dismissed by notes from Lord Holdernesse, the col- 
league of Fox in the Secretaryship of State. Fox indeed 
declares in a letter to Welbore Ellis, then peevish at not 
getting a better place, that he did not know till the last 
moment of the intention to remove anybody but Legge. 2 
To George Grenville, Bute, now beginning to show himself 
above ground, but still with circumspection, sent a signifi- 
cant note of congratulation. ' 'Tis glorious,' he wrote, 'to 
suffer in such a cause and with such companions.' Pitt 
received an even more gratifying communication from 
Temple, who settled on him a thousand a year till better 
times. We cannot perhaps blame Pitt for accepting this 
offer, since probably there was no other way of maintaining 
Lady Hester in decent comfort; for we may easily surmise 
that he had squandered his own fortune on buildings, gar- 
dens, and the like; as Temple probably knew. But we 
could wish that he had done so with less effusion. 'How 
decline or how receive so great a generosity so amiably 
offered. ' Lady Hester, who had begun the letter of thanks, 

1 Orford, ii. 55-62. = Fox to Ellis. Holland House MSS. 

374 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

'was literally not in a situation to write any farther.' Pitt 
was 'little better able to hold the pen than Lady Hester.' 
'We are both yours more affectionately than words can 
express. We could have slept upon the Earl of Holder- 
nesse's letter (of dismissal). But our hearts must now 
wake to gratitude and you, and wish for nothing but the 
return of day to embrace the best and noblest of brothers.' 
Even this is not sufficient. Next day he must write again 
to say to Lord Temple, 'that I am more yours than my 
own, and that I equally love and revere the kindest of 
brothers and the noblest of men. ' 

Language less ecstatic would better have become a 
great man accepting a serious pecuniary obligation. In 
truth Pitt never had any scrupulous idea of personal inde- 
pendence. He had accepted a borough from Newcastle, 
whom he then suspected and despised. Now it was an 
allowance from Temple, whom, from close intimacy and 
kinship, he must have known to be an intriguing politician, 
who was not likely to give without expecting return. A 
few years hence it was to be a pension from the Crown. 

With regard to money indeed he had no very careful or 
exalted standard. In such matters he was indifferent,, 
reckless, and heedless of any nicety of scruple, except as, 
regards the public. He never seems to have considered how 
important solvency is to character. He was always, after 
his marriage, quite unnecessarily, in desperate straits for 
money. Indifference to the fact that pecuniary independ- 
ence is a main though not necessary base of moral independ- 
ence was a flaw in his own life, and was the worst inheritance 
that he transmitted to his illustrious son. 

The announcement of Legge's successor at the Ex- 
chequer provoked universal hilarity. It was Lyttelton. 
We have seen that in the last debate Pitt had turned with 
fierce scorn on his former ally. No doubt he was aware of 

375 



LORD CHATHAM 

Lyttelton's approaching elevation. But their historic 
friendship had been dissolved for a year. In November, 
1754, at the heedless or mischievous instance of the younger 
Horace Walpole, Lyttelton, with the best intentions and 
the most inane execution possible, had hurried off, without 
consultation with his friend, to effect a reconciliation be- 
tween Newcastle, Pitt's enemy, and Bedford, who was 
allied to Pitt by a common hatred of the Minister. New- 
castle received the negotiator with his wonted effervescence, 
and gave or appeared to give full powers. Away sped 
Lyttelton, bursting with the importance of an amateur 
diplomatist. But at the mere mention of his mission the 
other Duke nearly kicked the messenger of peace down- 
stairs, and at once communicated the secret overture to 
Pitt. The result to Lyttelton was for the moment unmixed 
disaster. Pitt publicly broke with him, Newcastle of course 
disowned him, he indeed disowned himself. Henceforth he 
was banned by the Cousinhood, and incurred a wrath and 
vengeance as implacable as that of the Carbonari. Now, 
however, he had his reward, for it can scarcely be doubted 
that his elevation to the Exchequer was intended partly as 
a plaster for his diplomatic wounds, partly as an annoyance 
to the party of Pitt. Any motive indeed but fitness for the 
office can be suggested for his promotion, to which he was 
lured by the promise of a peerage. 1 If, however, the annoy- 
ance it would cause to his late friends was a reason, it failed 
in its object. For Lyttelton, in his new office, gave the 
amplest opportunity for the wreaking of their revenge. He 
was, as we have seen, grotesque as a diplomatist. He was 
even more unfit to be Chancellor of the Exchequer. 

Lyttelton had been a promising young man, but prom- 
ising young men frequently fail to mature, and he became 
a minor politician, a minor poet, a minor historian. As a 

1 Camelford. 
376 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

politician, he was principally known for the delivery of pom- 
pous prepared harangues. He wrote a pathetic and not 
wholly forgotten monody on the death of his first wife, to 
which he could have added a new and poignant emphasis 
after his second marriage. He wrote a treatise on the con- 
version of St. Paul, which earned the commendation of Dr. 
Johnson. He wrote some ' Dialogues of the Dead, ' which 
Dr. Johnson was not able to commend. He was now 
writing an elaborate History of Henry the Second, on the 
printer's corrections in which he spent a thousand pounds, 
and was soon to publish with a score of pages of errata. 
But his literary renown rests on the dedication of 'Tom 

Jones.' 

He was, however, best known to the public at large by 
his eccentric appearance and demeanour. ' Extremely tall 
and extremely thin, he bent under his own weight,' says his 
nephew Camelford. 'His face -was so ugly,' says Hervey, 
' his person so ill-made, and his carriage so awkward, that 
every feature was a blemish, every limb an incumbrance, 
and every motion a disgrace. ' Horace Walpole says of him 
that he had the figure of a spectre and the gesticulations of 
a puppet. Chesterfield portrays him as the embodiment of 
all in manner and deportment that was to be avoided. His 
legs and arms, said the urbane peer, seem to have undergone 
the rack, his head hanging limp on his shoulder the first 
stroke of the axe. As absent as a Laputan, he leaves his 
hat in one room, his sword in another, and would leave his 
shoes, if unfastened, in a third. 'Who's dat!' wrote the 
satirist, 

'Who's dat who ride astride de pony, 

So long, so lank, so lean and bony? 

Oh! he be de great orator Little-toney. ' 

He was obviously something of a butt from his physical 

377 



LORD CHATHAM 

peculiarities and awkwardness, and a butt is ill placed in 
high office. 

Gawky, fussy, pedantic, he was what in these days we 
should call a prig; a kindly prig, with a warm heart, some 
literary ability, and strong religious feeling ; but for all that 
an unmistakable, inveterate, incurable prig. The word 
'prig' is untranslatable and uncommunicable. It denotes 
nothing unamiable, nothing distasteful. It marks only a 
strange flaw; partly of intellect, partly of character, partly 
of accent. And one feels that it was impossible not to 
like Lyttelton, for he was full of friendliness and virtue. 
With Pitt he was reconciled within a decade, and mourned 
his death with a sincere sorrow which was not then 
abundant. 

But the Exchequer is a peculiar office requiring peculiar 
gifts. A dull man may succeed in it if he possess them; 
without them the greatest talents will fail. Lyttelton pos- 
sessed none of them. He was unable, it was alleged, to 
work out the simplest sum in arithmetic. He was ignor- 
ant of the first principles of finance. The Exchequer never 
had a more preposterous Chancellor, till Dashwood ap- 
peared. He had better have left it alone. 

Fox, whose accession to the leadership was said to have 
inspired Murray with courage, must have watched with 
gloomy forebodings the figure set up in the Exchequer to 
face the lightnings of Pitt. The most that he could hope 
was that it would act as an efficient conductor. Yet Fox 
needed all the strength that he could muster. For no one 
despised his chief more than he, or had a greater respect for 
the powers of his rival. 

It should further be noted that this ministry had a 
luckless connection which made it known as ' the Duke's 
ministry'; for it had been formed under the auspices and at 
the recommendation of the disastrous Cumberland. 'Never,' 

378 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

says Almon, 'was an administration more unpopular and 
odious.' 

War had now been declared between the Government 
and Pitt, who now certainly had the latent countenance of 
the Heir Apparent, or of the clique who represented the 
Heir Apparent ; and there was no delay in coming to blows. 
The very day after Pitt's dismissal, Welbore Ellis, a Lord of Nov. «. i 755 
the Admiralty, who was destined to live on as a Nestor in 
politics and be made a peer by Pitt's son, moved for 50,000 
seamen, mentioning that the peace establishment was 
40,000. It was a formal motion, and members were leaving 
the House, when they were recalled by the awful tones of 
Pitt, declaring that he shuddered at hearing that our naval 
resources were so narrowed. He recalled his former protest 
in 1 7 5 1 against reduction. He would hunt down the authors 
of these disastrous measures which made the King's crown 
totter on his head. This noble country of ours was being 
ruined by the silly pride of one man and the subservience of 
his colleagues, and some day we should have to answer for 
it; unless already overwhelmed by some catastrophe brought 
about by France, our hereditary enemy. All this trouble 
arose from the petty struggle for power. What power was 
it that was sought, what kind of power, was it only that of 
doing good ? On an English question like this he would not 
impede unanimity but implore it; he would ask favours in 
such a cause of any minister, would have gone that morning 
to Fox's first levee to ask him to accept 50,000 men besides 
marines. (The vote asked for was for 50,000 men, including 
91 13 marines.) If that could be obtained it would be the 
first thing done for this country since the Peace of Aix-la- 
Chapelle. He obscurely intimated charges of treachery 
and collusion. And now, he added, shame and danger had 
come together. He himself had been alarmed by intelligence 
on the highest authority. These terrors had been commu- 

379 



LORD CHATHAM 

nicated to the House which was willing to grant the King 
any assistance for any English object. But there was an 
essential difference between the ministry and that House. 
The ministry thought of everything but the public interest ; 
the House was ready to afford everything for it. The House, 
he added mysteriously, was a fluctuating body, but he hoped 
would be eternal; and he concluded with a prayer for the 
King, with his royal posterity, and for this 'poor, forlorn, 
distressed country.' 

It is not always easy to trace the sequence of Pitt's 
speeches in Walpole's notes, nor is it possible to tell whether 
the confusion is due to the oration or the notes. The notes 
were probably made during the debate with the intention 
of filling in the outlines while recollection was still fresh; 
an intention which, as is usual with such intentions, was, it 
may be safely surmised, never carried out. But we are 
inclined to attribute obscurity in the main to the abrupt 
rhapsodical transitions of Pitt's speeches. They require, as 
reported by Walpole, almost as much interpretation as 
Cromwell's. In this one we discern great court paid to the 
House of Commons, so hostile to himself ; unrelenting scorn of 
the Government ; and bitter emphasis on British as opposed 
to Hanoverian interests. The peroration as barely reported 
seems below the level of a debating society. But, then, we 
must remember that no fervent and exalted apostrophe, 
prolonged as this probably was, can be adequately trans- 
mitted in a naked sentence, or perhaps in any conceivable 
report. 

Fox replied with admirable temper, a self-control all the 
more laudable and noted because of his usual impetuous- 
ness. He took up Pitt's sneer at petty struggles for power. 
What the motives of these struggles for power had been let 
those tell who had struggled most and longest for power. 
They had been told that nobody round the King had sense 

380 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

or virtue, that sense and virtue resided somewhere else. 
How was the King to know where they are to be found? 
for he feared that this House of Commons would not point 
in the required direction. He ended by asking why Pitt 
had not asked sooner for his augmentation of force. 

This called up Pitt again, who denied that he had ever 
asserted that there were no sense and virtue near the 
Throne. No man had ever suffered so much as himself 
from those stilettoes of a Court which assassinate the fair 
repute of a man with his Sovereign. The insinuation of his 
having struggled for power had been received by the House 
with so much approval, that he must take notice of the 
charge. Had he yielded to the poor and sordid measures 
which are ruining the country he might, no doubt, have 
been admitted to the confidence of the Closet. Then, car- 
ried by anger beyond the facts, he went further, and said 
that as he was not prepared then to enter into the details 
of the private transactions of a whole summer, he would 
only say that he might have had what Fox had accepted. 
Unfortunately for himself, however, the measures contem- 
plated were so disastrous that his conscience and his honour 
had forbidden him to support them ; though he would have 
strained conscience a little, perhaps, to be admitted to the 
confidence of the King. No, it was not failure in the 
struggle for power that was the cause of his exclusion from 
office. Was it not that he would not approve of the Russian 
and Hessian treaties? He challenged a denial. 

Fox rose in reply, and said that he was ready to forget 
what Pitt had said about the lack of sense and virtue near 
the Throne. 

Pitt, evidently beside himself with wrath, interrupted 
him, and said he rose to order and, on that long-suffering 
plea, delivered another long speech. The phrase about 
sense and virtue, he declared on his honour, was none of his. 

381 



LORD CHATHAM 

What he said was that France would found her hopes on 
the want of sense, understanding, and virtue in those that 
govern here. Fox's modesty appeared to have taken these 
words to himself; but he had not put him right sooner, as 
the statement of the plain truth would sooner or later be 
sufficient. He would remind that gentleman of certain 
efforts which had been made (alluding to their brief coalition 
against Newcastle) to limit the power at which he had 
hinted. As to invective, he was not fond of employing it, 
but no man feared it less than himself. He was, however, 
complimentary to Fox; would, though no betting man, 
back his sense and spirit ; believed that we should get some 
information from abroad now that he was in power; but 
could not treat him as the minister, for that he was 
not yet. 

' But l he asks why I did not call out sooner. My calling 
out was more likely to defeat than promote. When I 
remonstrated for more seamen, I was called an enemy to 
Government: now I am told that I want to strew the King's 
pillow with thorns: am traduced, aspersed, calumniated 
from morning to night. / would have warned the King: 
did he f If he with his sense and spirit had represented to 
the King the necessity of augmentation, it would have been 
made — but what! if there is any man so wicked — don't let 
it be reported that I say there is — as to procrastinate the 
importing troops from Ireland, in order to make subsidiary 
forces necessary. 2 This whole summer I have been looking 
for Government. I saw none. Thank God, His Majesty 
was not here. The trade of France has been spared sillily, 
there has been dead stagnation. Orders contradicting one 
another were the only symptoms of spirit. When His 

1 Walpole here professes to give Pitt's words exactly. 

*I.e., suppose any man should have purposely put off bringing hither 
troops from Ireland, with the object of making this country appear so unpro- 
tected as to require foreign mercenaries. 

382 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

Majesty returned, his kingdom was delivered back to him 
more like a wreck than as a vessel able to stem the storm. 
Perhaps a little sustentation of life to the country will be 
obtained by a wretched peace. These are my sentiments, 
and when a man has truth on his side, he is not to be over- 
borne by quick interrogatories.' It may be presumed, and" 
indeed confidently hoped, that this was not Pitt's actual 
speech, though Walpole gives it as the very words. They 
are probably only heads. He continued with softening 
expressions to Fox. Want of virtue was the characteristic 
not merely of the Government but of the age. He himself 
was glad to show a zeal not inferior to that of ministers; 
let them show him how to serve the King, and then let 
them, if they could, tax him with strewing the royal pillow 
with thorns. But what were their own services? Murray 
indeed had boasted that 140,000 of the best troops in 
Europe were provided for the defence of — what? of Hanover. 
But what of England? What of the Colonies? Compare 
the countries, compare the forces destined for the defence 
of each! Two miserable battalions of Irish, who scarcely 
ever saw one another, had been sent to America as to the 
shambles. If his comparison of forces for Hanover and for 
the Empire was exaggerated, he would be glad to be told 
his error. 

Fox kept his temper, and remained on the defensive. 
He not unnaturally commented on the disorderliness of 
Pitt's speech to order. He did not 'on his honour' know 
what was the offer which Pitt had rejected. He himself 
had waited till everybody had refused, passing the summer 
at Holland House, as happy as any man in Parliament. He 
was in favour of the subsidies, and when that was known he 
was told 'Then support them'; and so he did. When his 
opinion changed he should leave office. He wished all evil 
might befall him if he had injured Pitt with the King, for 

3*3 



LORD CHATHAM 

he thought nothing so dishonourable as to accuse a man- 
where he could not defend himself. 

Murray followed with covert but bitter innuendoes ; de- 
fended Pelham's reduction of 2000 men, and had thought 
that that Minister had at least died in friendship with Pitt. 
This again brought Pitt on his feet to say that his friendship 
for Pelham had been as real as Murray's. Murray con- 
tinued coolly. The sting of his waspish speech was in its 
tail.- He wanted to clear up one particular point for his 
own information. He understood Pitt to say that he had 
refused the Secretaryship of State: pray, had he? 

He had his enemy at the point of the sword. Pitt had 
certainly, as we have seen, with incredible rashness, at least 
insinuated this, if not declared it. He now had to rise 
and eat his words: 'he had only refused to come into 
measures ' ! 1 

Walpole apologises for recording this debate, tedious as 
it is, at such a length. We must do the same, and his excuse 
is ours. Little was said on the question, and indeed there 
was scarcely a question to discuss. But the points of the 
speeches, so far as we can discern them, throw light on the 
speakers, more especially on the reckless, impetuous char- 
acter of Pitt, even at this time. 

1 Orford, ii. 67-76. 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 



CHAPTER XX 

THE bombardment of the new ministry continued 
without intermission, for Pitt was determined to 
wreak his vengeance on Newcastle and Fox. We may, 
moreover, presume that, seeing the critical condition of 
affairs and the incompetence of the ministry to wrestle with 
them, he, conscious of great powers, was determined to 
become a directing minister. He was now forty-seven, in 
the full ripeness of character and intellect. Neither he nor 
the country could afford to wait. 

Ten days after the last debate, Lord Pulteney, the sole Dec. 2 , 1755 
and short-lived hope of his famous father, introduced a Bill 
to give the prizes captured before a declaration of war to 
the seamen who had captured them, should war be after- 
wards declared. Pitt and his section intervened, and the 
engagement developed from a skirmish into a battle. The 
debate turned largely on pressing; that practice having 
brought great complaints from Scotland, where 'mobs are 
more dangerous and more mischievous than our mobs in 
England, not contenting themselves with clubs and bludg- 
eons, but possessing themselves of as many firearms and 
other mortal weapons as they can possibly come at.' This 
perhaps was not wonderful, when it was admitted that a 
gang had surrounded a church, and pressed part of the con- 
gregation as it came out. But it soon soared from that 
point to the question of our relations with France. 

Fox opposed the Bill, which he said would be considered 
as a veiled declaration of war. France was patient because 

385 



LORD CHATHAM 

she wished to persuade her allies that we were the aggressors, 
and so induce them to join her. The passing of the Bill 
would furnish the very proof she required. The whole gist 
of the matter lay in the word 'now,' 'the hinge,' he said 
with a painful confusion of metaphor, 'upon which the very 
marrow of this debate must turn.' Were peace hopeless 
such a Bill might be necessary; now it could only do harm. 
Pitt followed Fox and made play with the word ' now, ' for 
as Murray said in reply : ' He has the happy faculty of being 
able to turn the most important word, the most serious 
argument, into ridicule. He pointed out from examples in 
the reign of Elizabeth and Charles II. that we might be at 
war for many years without declaring war, and supported 
the Bill; as did Richard Lyttelton (though the House, says 
Rigby, can no longer be brought to hear a word from him), 
and George Grenville. The most piquant part of the 
speeches of both Pitt and Fox related to Walpole, who had 
now from a bugbear become a fetish. Fox pronounced a 
high eulogy upon him, but denied that his parliaments had 
been venal. Pitt said that he himself had always opposed 
Walpole when in power, but after resignation had always 
'spoken well of him as a man.' Here there was a laugh, 
which Pitt angrily rebuked. Was it not more honourable 
to respect a man when his power had come to an end than 
before ? Walpole had no doubt ' for many years an amazing 
influence in this House, and the enquiry, stifled as it was, 
made it pretty evident from whence that influence pro- 
ceeded!' Legge swelled the chorus of devotion to a min- 
ister who had scarce a friend at his fall, by declaring that 
' he was an honour to human nature and the peculiar friend 
to Great Britain!' Death, in British politics, magnani- 
mously closes most accounts with a credit balance. 1 
Dec. s. i75s Three days afterwards, Barrington, the new Secretary 

1 Pari. Hist., xv. 544-616. 
386 ' 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

at War, moved the Army Estimates. Here we are again 
thrown upon Walpole, whose records, precious as they are, 
are the notes of an amateur, jotted down at the time with 
the idea of subsequent expansion, but not subsequently 
expanded. Indeed, when he came to use them, his memory, 
it is probable, no longer availed for the purpose. But from 
the account of the last debate on December 2, 1755, the 
Parliament ary history, incredible as it may seem, records 
no speech of Pitt's till the last month of 1761, and then 
only a formal reply. 

Pitt, ' in one of his finest florid declamations, ' seconded 
the motion for an army of 34,263 men, which was an aug- 
mentation of 15,000 men. He would have moved for a 
larger number, had not Barrington promised to move for 
more men when he brought in a Bill for the better recruiting 
of the army, a pledge which seemed to meet the general 
anxiety of the House. Rigby, who gives us this informa- 
tion, says that Pitt's speech was most violent and abusive, 
but admits that it was a very fine piece of declamation. 1 
Both Walpole and Rigby, it will be observed, use this 
vigorous substantive to characterise the speech. 

Pitt again used the language of tenderness and devotion 
to the King, deplored to see him in his old age, and his 
kingdom exposed to attack ; and even his amiable posterity, 
born among us, sacrificed by unskilful ministers. 

The innuendo at the King's foreign birth betrays the 
sarcasm underlying Pitt's effusive loyalty. One cannot 
also but suspect that his constant allusions to the venerable 
age of George II. were not intended to be wholly agreeable 
to a King who piqued himself on being gay and libertine. 
' He then drew a striking and masterly picture of a French 
invasion reaching London, and of the horror ensuing, while 
there was a formidable enemy within the capital itself, as 

1 Bedford Corr., ii. 179. 
387 



LORD CHATHAM 

full of weakness as full of multitude; a flagitious rabble, 
ready for every nefarious action ; of the consternation in the 
City, where the noble, artificial, yet vulnerable fabric of 
public credit should crumble in their hands. How would 
ministers be able to meet the aspect of so many citizens 
dismayed? How could men so guilty meet their country- 
men?' 

The King's Speech of last year, he continued, had been 
calculated to lull the country into repose. Had His Ma- 
jesty's Ministers not sufficient understanding, or foresight, 
or virtue, he repeated the words that they might not again 
be misquoted, to lay before him the real danger ? Elsewhere, 
where the King himself had the slightest suspicion even of a 
fancied danger, we knew what vast preparations had been 
made. Did the subjects of his kingdom lack that prudent 
foresight which his subjects of the electorate possessed in so 
eminent a degree ? Alas ! that he should live to see a British 
Parliament so unequal to its duties. There were but ten 
thousand men left in England. Not half that number would 
be available to defend the royal family and the metropolis. 
' Half security is full danger. ' 

'Accursed be the man,' he continued, 'who will not do 
all he can to strengthen the King's hands, and he will indeed 
receive the malediction. Strengthen the Sovereign by lay- 
ing bare the weakness of his Councils : urge him to substitute 
reality to incapacity, futility, and the petty love of power. 
It is the little spirit of domination, the ambition of being 
the only figure among cyphers, which has caused the decay 
of this country. The ignominious indulgence of patronage, 
the poor desire to dispose of places, should be left for times 
of relaxation: rough times such as these require wisdom. 
The cost of the augmentation proposed to-day, two hundred 
and -eighty thousand pounds, would last year have given us 
security. Yet the danger was last year as Visible as now 

388 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

to the eye of foresight. The first attribute of a wise Minister 
is to leave as little as possible exposed to contingencies. 
Now, for want of that foresight, stocks will fall, and hurry 
along with them the ruin of the City, vulnerable in propor- 
tion to its opulence. In other countries the treasure re- 
mains in a city which is not sacked. But paper credit like 
ours may be wounded even in Kent. It is like the sensitive 
plant, it need not be cropped; extend but your hand, it 
withers and dies.' 

Barrington, the orator continued, had cited the Romans. 
He need not go so far afield, our own days had produced as 
great examples. In 1746, thirteen regiments had been 
raised by noblemen who, though they had not like the 
Romans left their ploughs, had left their palaces to save 
their country. With what scorn, depression, and cruelty, 
so far as contempt is cruelty, had they been treated ! 

He wished the country gentry encouraged to raise a 
militia, for he was anxious to call the country out of that 
enervated condition that the menace of twenty thousand 
men from France could shake it. It was our Government 
that was degenerate, not our people. He wished the breed 
restored that had formerly carried our glory so high. What 
did those Ministers deserve, and again he insinuated mys- 
terious hints of connivance and collusion, what did those 
Ministers deserve, who, after Washington had been defeated 
and our forts taken, advised his Majesty to trust to so slender 
a force as had been sent. He was for no vindictive pro- 
ceedings against them ; they erred from the weakness of their 
heads rather than their hearts. But a sagacity something 
less than that of a Richelieu or a Burleigh could have foreseen 
what would happen. 

Fox replied with urbanity and compliment, for there 
was at this time a marked courtesy in the language of the 
two protagonists, as of men who did not know how soon 

26 3 8 9 



LORD CHATHAM 

they might be allies. Pitt denounced Newcastle, and Fox 
did not defend him. This, too, must be noticed. Why, 
Fox now asked, had Pitt not made this noble speech sooner, 
when we were indeed asleep, before the French had wakened 
us. 'If he had made it, ' said Fox, ' I am sure I should have 
remembered it: I am not apt to forget his speeches.' Let 
Pitt himself take in hand a Militia Bill. It was evidently 
Fox whom Pitt had described as treating the thirteen regi- 
ments with contempt, at least Fox now fitted the cap on 
himself. He said that he thought obloquy too harsh a term 
to apply to his language on that occasion; nevertheless, he 
should not disown anything he had said. "But he must 
make a clear distinction between these noble persons. He 
thanked God there was one noble duke, able and willing to 
save his country, who went to the King, and offered to go 
and try if, with his lowlanders, he was not a match for any 
highlanders. This was an elaborate compliment to Bed- 
ford, whose political lowlanders were now at the service of 
the Government, though not the Chief himself. Fox at the 
same time made an invidious comparison to the detriment of 
the Duke of Montagu, and was on the point of saying that he 
must discriminate between dukes, for though some deserved 
everything from their country for the part they took, yet he 
should not be for trusting others to raise a regiment who 
could not raise half a crown. There was evidently money 
to be made out of these patriotic impulses. 1 

Pitt excused himself for not having sooner raised the cry 
of danger on the ground that he had been lulled into com- 
posure by the previous Speech from the Throne. When he 
became alarmed he made representations in private, so long 
as he was allowed to do so. But now the alarm must be 
sounded in Parliament itself, for we have invited into our 
bowels a war that was the child of ignorance and connivance. 

1 Bedford Corr., ii. 180. 
390 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

If there be justice in Heaven, Ministers must some day 
answer for this. 

Nugent, an Irish adventurer of the type known to com- 
edy, paid his court to Newcastle by a burlesque attack on 
Pitt. And even Robinson appeared once more on the scene 
with a panegyric on himself, which, though ridiculous to 
his audience, was by no means superfluous. The other 
notable speeches, delivered by Charles Townshend, Sack- 
ville, and Beckford, do not affect our subject. 1 

Five days later, George, who was afterwards Marquis, Dec. s, 1755 
Townshend, brought forward a Militia Bill. Pitt took this 
occasion of responding to Fox's challenge by unfolding a 
plan of his own. No scheme, he said, could be carried out 
without the co-operation of the Government, the Army, the 
Law, and the country gentry. But he unfortunately came 
under none of these descriptions. He knew no secrets of 
Government; he had too early been driven from the pro- 
fession of arms; he had never studied the law; he was no 
country gentleman. 

His plan was made the groundwork of a Bill, which oc- 
cupied much time in the Commons, but was lost in the 
Lords. 

It provided for an infantry militia of fifty or sixty thou- 
sand men, to be summoned compulsorily by the civil power: 
to be exercised twice a week, one of these days to be Sunday, 
if the clergy did not raise too much objection. It was to 
have the same pay as the infantry, but plain clothing, ' not 
pretending to all the lustre of the army.' The non-com- 
missioned officers were to be private soldiers, not fewer than 
four to every eighty men. 

What millions, he said, would have been saved by such 
a force during the last thirty years! And what an in- 
glorious picture for this country, to figure gentlemen driven 

1 Orford, ii. 86-97. 
391 



LORD CHATHAM 

by an invasion like a flock of sheep, and forced to send 
money abroad to buy courage and defence ! If this scheme 
should prove oppressive, provincially or parochially, he was 
willing to give it up. But surely it was preferable to wait- 
ing to see if the wind would blow you subsidiary troops. 
These, always an eyesore, you would never want again if 
this Bill were passed. This speech marked another step 
forward in Pitt's career; for he opened his plan with a plain 
precision, a mastery of detail, and a business-like clearness 
the House had hot expected from him. 'He had never 
shone in this light before.' 1 
Dec. 10, i75s Two days later, again the treaties were discussed in both 
Houses. 

The debate in the Lords does not concern us. It was 
spirited and bitter. Temple raised the storm, while the 
future George III. sate and took notes. In the Commons 
there was a new feature. Newcastle, doubtful of the zeal 
of Fox and Murray on his behalf, had retained for his de- 
fence Hume Campbell, the brother of Marchmont ; with the 
Pay mastership as a retaining fee, had not Fox, who always 
had his eye on this lucrative place, vetoed the appointment. 
Walpole describes the new gladiator as eloquent, acute, 
abusive, corrupt, insatiable. To this accumulation of epi- 
thets we need and can add nothing. He had been in oppo- 
sition with Pitt, and had had a brush with him already, but 
had almost given up attendance in Parliament. 

Hume Campbell, raised to this bad eminence, seems to 
have acquitted himself ably in his opening attack, and to 
have delivered a masterly speech. He could see no reason, 
he said, why gentlemen were suffered to come every day to 
the House merely to threaten and arraign the conduct of 
their superiors. Such behaviour was unparliamentary and 
unprecedented. 'Let the House punish,' he said, 'these 

1 Orford, ii. 98-101. 
392 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

eternal invectives.' Pitt angrily called him to order for so 
describing the debates of that House. Horace Walpole, the 
elder, said, with some reason, that Pitt ought to be the last 
man in the House to complain of irregularity. Pitt de- 
clared that Campbell's words struck directly at the liberty 
of debate; that he had a mind to move to have the words 
taken down, but would refrain till the orator had explained 
himself. Campbell then proceeded with his discourse. He 
was followed by other speakers, Murray delivering a fine 
argument in defence of the treaties. Pitt, meanwhile, con- 
trary to his habit, possessed himself in silence, collecting all 
his powers for his reply. When he arose he delivered one 
that was memorable and overwhelming. ' You never heard 
such a philippic as Pitt returned. Hume Campbell was 
annihilated. Pitt, like an angry wasp, seems to have left his 
sting in the wound, and has since assumed a style of delicate 
ridicule and repartee. But think how charming a ridicule 
must be that lasts and rises, flash after flash, for an hour 
and a half! Some day perhaps you will see some of the glit- 
tering splinters that I gathered up.' 

So wrote Horace Walpole in the first enthusiasm pro- 
duced by this effort. But the more deliberate record in his 
memoirs reveals few of the flashing splinters that he thought 
to have garnered. Luckily, Sir William Meredith has left a 
very brief account ' of the tilt between Campbell and Pitt, 
which we can collate with Walpole 's. 

So slight had been the defence, said Pitt, that he did not 
know how to deal with it; only little shifts or evasions 
worthy of a pie-poudre court, but not of Parliament. As 
for Hume Campbell, he had him in his power, he could 
bring him to his knees at the bar of the House as a delin- 
quent for such an assault on the privileges of parliament. 
If members were to be threatened for speaking with freedom 

i Holland House MSS. 
393 



LORD CHATHAM 

of ministers, all liberty of debate would be at an end. As 
he revered the profession of the law, so he grieved to hear it 
dishonoured by language that fixed an indelible blot on him 
that spoke it. 'Superior' was a word that he disdained. 
That hon. gentleman might indeed have his superiors. But 
he knew that when sitting, speaking, and voting in his legis- 
lative capacity the King himself was not his superior. And 
he could assure the hon. gentleman that such freedom in 
speaking of ministers was neither unparliamentary nor un- 
precedented. For even in the profligate prerogative reign 
of James I., when a great duke, as now, monopolised power, 
the House of Commons possessed an honest member who 
dared to call that duke stellionatus, a beast of most hideous 
deformity, covered with blurs and blotches and filth, an 
ideal monster, fouler than exists in nature. Yet a grave and 
venerable member of parliament thought this no unfit com- 
parison for that great duke, who no doubt had his slaves all 
about him who called him Superior, yet durst not bring such 
language into the House of Commons. And we had then a 
wretched King who would have been glad of the assistance 
of a great lawyer, could he have one to have threatened a 
member of parliament for exposing the arbitrary and per- 
nicious designs that he was carrying on by his ministers 
against his people. Thank God ! we had no such King. If we 
had, he would not want a slavish lawyer to abet the worst 
measures that can be devised to ruin and enslave this country. 

' But I will not dress up this image under a third person,' 
he exclaimed, turning full round and facing Hume Camp- 
bell, ' I apply it to him; his is the servile doctrine; he is the 
slave ; and the shame of his doctrine will stick to him as long 
as his gown sticks to his back. After all, his trade is words ; 
they were not provoked by me, but they have no terrors for 
me, they provoke only my ridicule and contempt.' 

Then turning to Murray he denounced the treaties as 

394 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

a violation of the Act of Settlement. The article to which, 
it may be presumed, he referred was as follows: 

'That in case the Crown and Imperial Dignity of this 
realm shall hereafter come to any person, not being a native 
of this Kingdom of England, this nation be not obliged to 
engage in any war for the defence of any dominions or ter- 
ritories which do not belong to the Crown of England with- 
out the consent of Parliament.' 

It cannot be said that this enactment had been specially 
present to the mind of George II. at any period of his reign. 
Murray had defended the treaties thinly against the charge 
of infringement by declaring that if this treaty violated the 
Act of Settlement all our defensive treaties had done the 
same, and had ended by the quaint and almost cynical re- 
mark that ' we could not enjoy the blessing of the present 
Royal Family without the inconveniences.' 

Pitt can have had, and in fact had, but little difficulty in 
dealing with Murray. ' It is difficult to know where to pull 
the first thread from a piece so finely spun. Constructions 
ought never to condemn a great minister, but I think this 
crime of violating the Act of Settlement is within the letter. 
If the dangerous illegality of this is to be inquired into, it 
should be referred to a committee of the whole House, not to 
a Committee of Supply. Inquired into it must be, for I will 
not suffer an audacious minister to escape the judgment of 
Parliament. For if a Cabinet have taken upon them to con- 
clude treaties of subsidy without the consent of Parliament, 
shall they not answer for their action?' 

He derided Murray's precedents. For in 1717 or 1718 
Ministers stated that there was danger to be apprehended 
from Sweden, and then asked for money. Would any law- 
yer plead that when his Britannic Majesty speaks of domin- 
ions in a treaty, he can mean any but his British dominions? 
We were not to be explained out of our liberties, 

395 



LORD CHATHAM 

He then criticised the conduct of the Hessians in the last 
war; except on one occasion, when they were forced at 
Munich, they had not behaved well. 

There Horace Walpole's notes branch off into a tangle 
of headings and exclamations which it is difficult and un- 
necessary to unravel. Pitt emphatically denied that the 
Crown had a power of concluding treaties of subsidy that led 
to war. He was sorry to hear it avowed that Hanover was 
concerned in all the treaties which had been cited. It was 
clearly a time to make a stand, now that we had arrived at 
that pitch of adulation that we were ready to declare openly 
that Hanover was at the back of all. He wished that the 
circumstances of this country would enable us to extend this 
protecting care to Hanover, but they would not. For no 
consideration would he have set his hand to these treaties. 

Fox in reply defended Hume Campbell with spirit, and 
made ironical retorts to Pitt, some of them now obscure, 
none of them now pertinent to this narrative. Such 
speeches become trivial within forty-eight hours of their 
delivery. The bones of Pitt's preserved by Walpole scarcely 
claim any better right of survival. To tell the bare truth, 
what survives of these debates is incomparably tedious and 
confused. But it is evident that Pitt had amazed the House 
by disclosing a new weapon, the power of ridicule. 'His 
antagonists endeavoured to disarm him. But as fast as they 
deprive him of one weapon, he finds a better. I never sus- 
pected him of such an universal armoury; I knew he had a 
Gorgon's head, composed of bayonets and pistols, but little 
thought that he could tickle to death with a feather. ' 

Whatever the relative arguments may have been, the 

legions were faithful, and voted the treaties by 318 to 126. 

1755 On December 12 the general engagement on the treaties 

was renewed, when Barrington brought them forward in 

Committee, and Charles Townshend distinguished himself 

396 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

by a speech which, Pitt declared, displayed such abilities as 
had not appeared since that House was a House. He him- 
self spoke at length, but poorly and languidly, not deigning 
to answer Hume Campbell, who once more appeared, with 
manner and matter both ' flat and mean.' 

Pitt said, in the few sentences into which Walpole con- 
denses his speech, that he did not pretend to eloquence, 
but owed all his credit to the indulgence of the House. 
He looked with respect on the King's prejudices, he added 
with the finesse of a courtier or the irony of a foe, and with 
contempt on those who encouraged them. Was everything 
to be called invective that had not the smoothness of a 
court compliment? Old Horace Walpole had said that if 
one spoke against Hanover it might cause a rebellion. 
That was the chatter of a boarding-school miss. Lord 
Townshend and Sir Robert Walpole had withstood Han- 
over. ' Sir Robert thought well of me, died in peace with 
me. He was a truly English minister, and kept a strict 
hand on the Closet; when he was removed the door was 
flung open (to dangerous advisers?). His friends and 
followers had then transferred themselves to that minister, 
Lord Granville, who transplanted (sic) that English min- 
ister. Even Sir Robert's own reverend brother has gone 
over to the Hanoverian party!' 

Fox merely tried in reply to keep Pitt at bay, so he said 
little of the treaties, but seems to have attacked his rival 
with some acrimony. He recalled all the treasonable songs 
and pamphlets of the former Opposition, all directed by 
Pitt, no doubt for the good of the country! But he could 
never forgive any man who had the heart to conceive, the 
head to contrive, and the hand to execute so much mis- 
chief. 'The right honourable gentleman professes pride 
at acting with some here; I am proud of acting with so 
many! But because he wishes that Hanover should be 

397 



LORD CHATHAM 

separated from England, is it wise to act as if it were al- 
ready separated?' 

The legions once more prevailed, and approved both 
treaties by 289 to 121. 

If Pitt was held to have been below himself in this 
debate, he was considered to have surpassed himself, when 
Dec. 15, 1755 the treaties came up on report three days afterwards, in a 
speech ' of most admirable and ready wit that flashed from 
him for the space of an hour and a half, accompanied with 
action that would have added reputation to Garrick.' He 
denounced Murray for attempting to hide the points at 
issue in a cloud of words. But in fact these treaties from 
simple questions had become all things to all men, as a 
conjuror plays with a pack of cards, passing them in turn 
to each spectator, receiving and keeping the money of all. 
Then he turned to Russia. ' Let us consider this Northern 
Star, that will not shine with any light of its own, but re- 
quires to be rubbed up into lustre; for could Russia, with- 
out our assistance, support her own troops? She will 
not prove a Star of the Wise Men, yet they must approach 
her with presents. The real Wise Man "Quae desperat 
tractata nitescere posse relinquit." 

'By this measure you are throwing Prussia into the 
arms of France. What can Frederick answer if France 
proposes to march an army into Germany? If he re- 
fuses to join her will she not threaten to leave him at the 
mercy of Russia? This is one of the effects of our sage 
negotiations — not to mention that we have wasted tenor' 
eleven millions in subsidies. 

'Shall we not set the impossibility of our carrying 
on so extensive a war against the contention that his 
Majesty's honour is engaged? Our Ministers foresaw our 
ill-success at sea, and prudently laid a nest-egg for a war 
on the Continent. We have as an inducement to engage 

398 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

in this war been referred to the examples of Greece and 
Carthage. These ancient histories, no doubt, furnish 
ample matter for declamation. It is long since I read 
them, but I think I recollect enough to show how inap- 
plicable they are to our present • circumstances. Suppose 
Thebes and Sparta and the other Greek Commonwealths 
fallen from their former power, would Athens have gone on 
alone and paid all the rest? No, Athens put herself on 
board her fleet to fight where she could be superior, and 
so recovered her land. 

'Not giving succour to Hannibal was indeed wrong, 
because he was already on land and was successful, and 
might have done something of the kind that Prince Eugene 
proposed, and marched with a torch to Versailles. But 
another poet says — I recollect a good deal of poetry to-day 
— another poet says, " Expende Hannibalem, " " weigh him, 
weigh him." I have weighed him. What good did his 
glory procure to his country? Remember what the same 
poet says: "I, demens, curre per Alpes, ut pueris placeas 
et declamatio fias. '" 

This flight, it may be surmised, was aimed at Cum- 
berland. 

He once more expressed his dutiful feelings to the 
King, and acknowledged how difficult it was for Ministers 
to be honest with him. But yet the resistance to these 
treaties might save us from a Continental war. In any 
case, speaking for himself, he would never again give his 
confidence in the nation's advisers or adopters of this 
measure. He could only hope that our perverted Minis- 
ters might yet yield to conviction and save us, and that a 
British spirit might influence British councils. 

In the division which followed, the Hessian treaty ap- 
peared somewhat less acceptable than the Russian. The 
former was voted by 259 to 72 and the latter by 263 to 69. 

399 



LORD CHATHAM 

This was the net result. Yet, as Horace Walpole wrote at 
the time, 'Pitt had ridden in the whirlwind and directed 
the storm with abilities beyond the common reach of the 
genii of the tempest.' Eloquence, reason, and argument 
avail little against a compact parliamentary majority. 1 

The reader will scarcely regret that an adjournment 
for Christmas followed this debate, for nothing is so tan- 
talising as these barren husks of great speeches. The 
Minister employed his holiday appropriately in distribut- 
ing gifts of office to his friends, and the reconstruction of 
the Government was completed. No part of it directly 
touches our story, but some features are of interest. The 
Dukes of Newcastle and Bedford, the Chancellor and Fox 
were each allowed to nominate a member of the Board of 
Trade. But Newcastle would not allow Fox a single voice 
in the appointment of the Lords of the Treasury; for he 
guarded that department with the jealousy of a Turk. The 
other point of interest was the cost to the public of these 
manipulations. To get rid of Sir Thomas Robinson it had 
been necessary to settle a pension on him of 2000/. a year 
for thirty-one years. To make a place for Lord Hillsbor- 
ough, Mr. Arundel had a pension of 2000/. in exchange for 
the sinecure office of Treasurer of the Chamber. Lord 
Lothian had 1200/. a year to vacate the Clerk Registership 
of Scotland for Hume Campbell. Lord Cholmondeley, who 
held the Vice-Treasurership of Ireland with one colleague, 
had 600/. a year to induce him to accept a third partner of 
the office. Sir Conyers Darcy had 1600/. a year for vacating 
the Comptrollership of the Household. In all a burden of 
7400/. a year was settled on the public to patch up a feeble 
and odious ministry for ten months. 

While the gentle showers of office and pensions were de- 
scending on parched politicians, Pitt wended his valetu- 

1 Orford, ii. 135-9. 
400 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

dinarian way, as usual, to Bath. But when Parliament 
met in January, he was in his place, alert and thirsting 
for combat. 

We first catch a glimpse of him on January 23, pay- 1756 
ing great court to Beckford; with conspicuous success 
as it happened, for Beckford hereafter was to be his de- 
voted follower, and his invaluable agent in the City of 
London. On the same day the new Chancellor of the 
Exchequer unfolded his Budget, better than was expected, 
but bewildered with the figures. ' He stumbled over mil- 
lions, and dwelt pompously over farthings.' His Budget 
dealt with figures enviably small; duties on plate, calcu- 
lated to produce 30,000/. a year, which produced 18,000/.; 
on bricks and tiles which were to produce 30,000/. a year, 
and on cards and dice which were to produce 17,000/. 
Bricks and tiles failed the Government; the tax was too 
unpopular; so, it is scarcely necessary to state, it was 
moved on to ale-houses. A generation, which passes tens 
of millions of expenditure without breaking silence, looks 
back with awe on that which deployed the full splendour 
of eloquence on taxes which altogether were not to produce 
80,000/. a year. Pitt, who was almost as ignorant of 
finance as the Chancellor of the Exchequer, attacked him 
with vigour, but Lyttelton replied effectively. In speak- 
ing he mentioned Pitt as his friend, but corrected it to ' the 
gentleman.' This raised a laugh, when Lyttelton re- 
marked, not without pathos, 'If he is not my friend, it is 
not my fault,' and the contest, after lasting some time, 
mellowed into good humour. 

A few days later Pitt broke out again and declared that Jan. 28, 1736 
the Ministry was disjointed, and united only in corrupt and 
arbitrary measures. Fox denied this publicly and pri- 
vately; publicly sneering at Pitt's family connection, pri- 
vately assuring Pitt that, so far from there being any disunion 

401 



LORD CHATHAM 

between Newcastle and himself, the two Townshends had 
offered to join the Duke if he would give up Fox, and that 
the minister had refused them. 
Feb. 9 , i7s6 The next battle was on a proposal to raise four Swiss 
battalions to be employed in America, when Pitt, as usual, 
censured the dilatoriness of the Government and flouted 
their ' paper ' forces. Lord Loudoun commanded only a 
scroll, he said; the suggested battalions were only adding 

Feb. io, 1756 paper to paper; and so forth. Next day he diverted the 
debate from its tedious course by accusing the Government 
of having cashiered a brave officer, Sir Henry Erskine, a 
friend of Bute's by-the-by, on account of his vote in Par- 
liament. But this ended in nothing. 

Feb. 20, 1756 At a later stage, Pitt ironically described the plan for 
the Swiss auxiliaries as a fortuitous blessing, for had not 
Prevot, the adventurer who was to command the battal- 
ions, been taken prisoner by the French and found his way 
from Brest hither, and had he not then taken it into his 
head that he would like to command a regiment, nothing 
would have been heard of it. He hoped this Ulysses-like 
wanderer might be as wise as his prototype and so forth; 
one can imagine the sort of pleasantry. But it was Charles 
Townshend who, 'content with promoting confusion,' 
chiefly shone at this time. On the other hand, one of Pitt's 
speeches, urging that the Colonies should be heard on this 
Swiss scheme, is described as lasting an hour and a half 
without fire or force. Indeed, Walpole writes of this 
debate that the ' opposition neither increase in numbers or 
eloquence; the want of the former seems to have damped 
the fire of the latter, ' and that ' the House of Commons has 
dwindled into a very dialogue between Pitt and Fox .... 
in which, though Pitt has attacked, Fox has generally had 
the better.' Pitt seemed to be becoming dull and diffuse. 
■ Mr. Pitt talks by Shrewsbury clock, and is grown almost as 

402 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

little heard as that is at Westminster. ' Still one wishes that 
the chronicler had reported the speeches of either as faith- 
fully as he reports his own. 

The apprehension of a French invasion, which had been 
present for months, became acute in March and April (1756). 
The Government asked for the troops which Holland was, 
it was held, bound to furnish, and they were refused. 
Thereupon Lord George Sackville, probably by concert with 
the Court or to gain its favour, suggested a preference for 
Hanoverians, whose soldier-like qualities he commended. 
The hint was acted upon with suspicious promptitude ; and 
on March 29, Fox formally moved to address the King to 
send for his Electoral troops. 1 

Pitt, swathed as an invalid, opposed the motion in a 
long speech. He alleged his respect for the King as the 
ground of his opposition. For this address would be 
advice to the King in his Electoral capacity which we had 
no claim to offer, and which, moreover, might involve his 
Electorate in a peril equal to our own. He seems to have 
argued against any fear of invasion, on the ground that in 
the Dutch war, with a suspected King, we had coped with 
Holland and France; that in 1690, when the French had 
beaten our fleet at Beachy Head and had an army actually in 
Ireland, we had surmounted that danger; and that de Witt, 
the greatest man since the men of Plutarch, had proposed 
an invasion to d'Estrades, who had treated it as a chimerical 
suggestion. In any case the natural force of the nation was 
sufficient to repel any attack of the enemy. That state 
alone is a sovereign state 'qui suis stat viribus, non alieno 
pendet arbitrio,' which subsists by its own strength, not by 
the courtesy of its neighbours : 2 words which may have in- 

1 Orford says that Sackville moved for them on April 29. The Parlia- 
mentary History says that Fox moved for them on March 29 (xv. 702). 

2 Pari. Hist., xv. 702. 

403 



LORD CHATHAM 

spired Lord Lyndhurst, a century afterwards, with his 
famous phrase with regard to a State existing on suffer- 
ance. He would vote, Pitt proceeded, for raising any num- 
bers of British troops. The late war had formed many 
great officers, and he would not interpose foreigners to hin- 
der their promotion; nor would he force this vote on the 
King when he might send for his troops without. 1 The mo- 
tion was agreed to by 259 to 92. Bubb comically com- 
mented on the readiness of the King, who had then amassed, 
it was believed, an immense treasure in Hanover, to make 
the nation pay for this defence of himself, by declaring that 
1 His Majesty would not for the world lend himself a farth- 
ing.' Not less humorous is the story preserved by Horace 
Walpole that the night the Hanoverian troops were voted, 
he summoned his German cook and ordered himself an 
exceptionally good supper. ' Get me all de varieties, ' said 
the homely monarch, 'I don't mind expense.' A lampoon 
in the form of an anecdote, it is to be supposed. 
March 30, Next day Pitt had another opportunity for attack on 
the charge involved by the employment of Hessian troops, 
who, he declared, would cost 400,000/. more than the same 
number of British troops. But, a few days afterwards, 
there was a still better occasion when Barrington brought 
forward the estimate for the Hanoverian troops, and com- 
mended it as a better bargain than the Hessian, which 
had been passed, and was therefore secure. Pitt at once 
harped on the same strain, and, lauding the Hanoverian 
estimate, fell still more vehemently on the Hessian. No 
one could find fault with the Hanoverian, that we owed to 
His Majesty; but the subsidiary juggle with Hesse was the 
work of his Ministers. 'Nothing but good flows from 
the King; nothing but ruin from his servants. I choose 
that they shall fall by a friendly hand, and that the con- 

1 Orford, ii. 185-6. 
404 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

demnation of his patrons should come from the noble lord 
himself (Barrington). But must we engage mercenaries 
because France does? She engages them,' he said, with one 
of his phrases of picturesque energy, 'because she has not 
blood enough in her own veins for the purpose of universal 
monarchy.' He despaired of preserving Minorca, he con- 
tinued with gloomy prescience, yet the waste on these 
Hessians would have saved that island, would have con- 
quered America. He broke out bitterly against the de- 
partmental character of the Government. 'I don't call 
this an administration, it is so unsteady. One is at the 
head of the Treasury; one, Chancellor; one, head of the 
Navy; one great person, of the Army. But is that an ad- 
ministration? They shift and shuffle the charge from one 
to another. One says, " I am not the General ' ' ; the 
Treasury says, "I am not the Admiral"; the Admiralty 
says, " I am not the Minister." From such an unaccording 
assemblage of separate and distinct powers with no system, 
a nullity results. One, two, three, four, five lords meet. If 
they cannot agree, "Oh, we will meet again on Saturday!" 
"Oh," but says one of them, "I am to go out of town." 
Alas! when no parties survive to thwart them, what an 
aggravation it is that no good comes from such unanimity ! ' 

Fox, in reply, asked if Pitt wished to see a sole Minis- 
ter, a question that suggests that there was already an 
impression abroad that Pitt was aiming at the dictatorship 
which he afterwards received, or else that Pitt, if he ob- 
tained office, would be so overbearing as to become the sole 
Minister. 

Pitt, at any rate, did not accept the allusion as to him- 
self. He said that he did not wish to see a single minister, 
but system and decision. Indeed, he gracefully added, 
were Fox sole Minister there would be decision enough. 1 

1 Orford, ii. 188-190. 
27 405 



LORD CHATHAM 

On May n (1756) a royal message apprised Parliament 
of the treaty concluded with Prussia (the Convention 
of Westminster, signed January 1756), and asking his faith- 
ful Commons for supplies. 

The House promptly voted a million on account, but 
Pitt as usual uttered eloquent lamentations on the inca- 
pacity of Ministers and the calamitous situation of affairs. 
What was this vote of credit for? Was it to raise more 
men? We had already 40,000 British and 14,000 foreign 
troops. Was it for the purpose of marine treaties? Then 
he would joyfully vote it. For a naval war we could and 
ought to support, but a Continental war on the present 
system we could not. Regard should no doubt be had to 
Hanover, but a secondary regard. For if Hanover was to 
be our first object it would lead us to bankruptcy. It was 
impossible to defend Hanover by subsidies. How could 
an open country be defended against an enemy who could 
march 150,000 men into it, and if necessary reinforce them 
by as many more? Should Hanover suffer by her connec- 
tion with Great Britain, we ought not to make peace without 
exacting full and ample compensation for all the damage 
and injury she might have sustained. But the idea of de- 
fending Hanover by subsidies was preposterous, absurd, 
and impracticable. Then, excited by this favourite theme 
beyond the limits he had imposed on himself, he struck 
home at the King and his darling patrimony. This system, 
he said, would in a few years cost us more money than the 
fee simple of the electorate was worth, a place which after 
all could not be found in the map. He ardently wished us 
to break those fetters which chained us like Prometheus to 
that barren rock. (The metaphor which made a rock of 
Hanover does not strike one as one of his happiest efforts.) 

If Lyttelton could not state the purpose for which this 
credit was designed, perhaps he could say for what it was 

406 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

not designed. Still, Pitt added sardonically, he was of so 
compounding a temper that he should assent to it. 

Ministers bragged of their unanimity and spirit. But 
what had all this army of councils and talents, this universal 
aye, produced? Were we safe? Had we inflicted any 
damage on the enemy? If so, when and where? 

He had no particular pleasure in thus speaking. He 
did not wish to load the unhappy men who had undone 
their country, most unhappy if they did not realise it. And 
our activity! Philosophers indeed had a phrase vis inertia 
by which they denoted the inactivity of action (sic) . Was 
it by that that we were to be saved? 

His charge against the Government was this: that we 
had provoked before we could defend, and neglected after 
provocation^ that we were left inferior to France in every 
quarter; that the vote of credit had been misapplied to 
secure Hanover; and that we had bought a treaty with 
Prussia by sacrificing our rights. He would not have signed 
such a treaty to have the five great places of those who had 
signed it. Yet if this treaty were restrained to the defence 
of the King's dominions he should not know how to op- 
pose it. 

He had no feeling of resentment against the Govern- 
ment, no one had injured him. Yet he could not but think 
ill of their capacity and their measures. Could he, then, 
every day, arraign their policy and feel confidence in them? 
Pelham indeed had intended economy, but he was dragged 
into this foreign policy by his brother, now at the head of 
the Treasury. And if he, Pitt, saw Newcastle like a child 
driving a go-cart with that precious freight of an old King 
and his family on to a precipice, was he not bound to try 
and take the reins from his hands? And with a gloomy 
foreboding which must have chilled the anxious House, he 
solemnly prayed that the King might not have Minorca 

407 



LORD CHATHAM 

written on his heart, as Calais had been, in the dying declara- 
tion of Mary, engraved on hers. 

The debate ended with a bitter rally between Pitt and 
Lyttelton, the fiercer for their former friendship. Lyttelton 
had sneered at his epithets. This came well, said Pitt, from 
Lyttelton, whose own character was a composition of 
epithets. He himself had used no epithets that day, so 
Lyttelton had chosen ill the occasion for his taunt. But 
in any case the House was not an academy for the exchange 
of compliments. And when Lyttelton disclaimed any share 
in framing the motion, it was obvious that he was not at 
liberty to change it. If Lyttelton would declare that he 
had no more resources, he would only say that Lyttelton 
was incapable. 

The new Chancellor of the Exchequer, whose heart was 
still warm with his old affection, was hurt by this attack, 
but he maintained his ground. ' He says I am but a thing 
made up of epithets. Is not this the language of Billings- 
gate? The world is complaining that the House was turned 
into a bear garden. I do not envy my friend the glory of 
being the Figg or Brought on of it.' Pitt retorted that 
Lyttelton was a very pretty poet, and that there was no 
one whom he more respected pen in hand. ' But it is hard 
that my friend, with whom I have taken sweet counsel in 
epithets, should now reproach me with using them.' Lyt- 
telton replied once more that it was not his fault if he and 
Pitt were not still friends. 1 
i4» i7s6 A day or two later Lyttelton unfolded to the House the 
provisions of the Treaty of Westminster. It had cleared 
up some small pecuniary claims on both sides, so much to 
Frederick for losses from British privateers, so much from 
Frederick for arrears of interest on the Silesian loan, a 
balance of 40,000/. due on the whole to Great Britain. On 

1 Orford, ii. 193-7. 
408 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

this, Pitt, inveterate against the ministry, fulminated once 
more. He declared that by payment, even of a small sum, 
we had conceded the principle of our Empire over the sea, 
and went off into the usual rhetoric. ' For himself he should 
affect no superiority but what was common to him with the 
twelve millions of his countrymen, innocence of his country's 
ruin, the superiority of the undone over the undoers.' 

All that is notable in these crumbs of debate is the 
strategy of Pitt ; to hammer at the enemy without ceasing, 
not to allow him a moment to breathe or recover, but to 
display him to the country day and night pummelled, be- 
wildered and helpless, until he should succumb from ex- 
haustion ; when the country should insist on the removal of 
the defeated combatant, and the substitution of his con- 
queror. Pitt was openly set on the destruction of the 
Newcastle Government for more reasons than one. He 
was vindictive and had been slighted; he was profoundly 
anxious about the position of the country, and convinced 
of the incapacity of Newcastle to govern; he wished to 
try his own hand at the game, believing that he could do 
better, convinced that he could do no worse, than the 
Ministers whom he had seen at work. 



LORD CHATHAM 



CHAPTER XXI 

BUT national calamity was now to lend irresistible force 
to his attacks. It had been known for some time that 
France was meditating an attack on Gibraltar or Minorca, 
and in the beginning of March it became certain that 
Minorca was to be the object. 1 During the first week of 
May the Government received the news that the French 
had actually landed on the island. War was formally 
and not prematurely declared on May 18. Six weeks 
earlier the ill-fated Byng had sailed with a fleet to relieve 
the fortress. The country waited for news with bated 
breath. The King declared that he could neither eat nor 
sleep. Saunders, afterwards to be Pitt's First Lord of the 
Admiralty, reassured his Sovereign by saying that they 
should screw his heart out if Byng were not at that mo- 
ment (June 7) in the harbour of Mahon. 2 Then came the 
news that Byng, after an indecisive engagement with the 
French fleet, had sailed back to Gibraltar and left Minorca 
to its fate. Still the nation, though raging against Byng, 
hoped against hope, till on July 14 the news came that 
Fort St. Philip, the British fort, had surrendered after a 
gallant defence on June 28, and that Minorca was in the 
hands of the French. The long-compressed anxiety ex- 

1 The Consul at Genoa had warned Newcastle early in February that a sur- 
prise attack on Minorca was meditated. Mr. Corbett, who states this (England 
in the Seven Years' War, i. 97), excuses Newcastle for neglecting the information, 
one does not see why. More attention was paid to an intercepted dispatch of 
the Swedish minister at Paris, dated February 25, 1756. 
% 2 Walpole to Chute, June 8, 1756. 

410 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

ploded in a terrible outburst of wrath against Byng. Ad- 
dresses poured in from every part of England demanding 
vengeance upon him. The unhappy Admiral was brought 
back to Greenwich Hospital as a prisoner to await a court- 
martial. But the nation had already turned its thumb 
downwards. Perhaps the best idea of the popular senti- 
ment is conveyed by the fact that Byng's brother, who 
went to meet the Admiral, was stricken to death by the 
popular fury wherever he passed; so that he fell ill at the 
first sight of the prisoner, and died next day in convulsions. 
There was no chance of a fair trial for the unhappy man. 
To the merchants of London bringing one of the addresses 
for his exemplary punishment Newcastle, not sorry to 
have a scapegoat, had blurted out, 'Oh! indeed he shall 
be tried immediately: he shall be hanged directly.' And 
executed he was, after an agony of eight months, in spite 
of justice, in spite of Pitt, who had the fine courage to 
support him, in deference to the nation and the King who 
were bent on his death. Voltaire, who had tried with real 
humanity to save him, sardonically described the execu- 
tion in Candide, 'Dans ce pays-ci il est bon de tuer de 
temps en temps un amiral pour encourager les autres,' a 
phrase which he appears to have borrowed from the Knights 
of Malta. 1 

Something less, much less than Nelson, might have 
saved Minorca. The truth seems to be that Byng, who 
was personally brave, sailed from Gibraltar with the pre- 
conceived impression that Minorca was lost, and acted 
throughout under this conviction, without energy or re- 

1 ' So also we find it recorded during the siege of Malta, that some hesitation 
having displayed itself on the part of the slaves in exposing themselves, during 
their pioneering labours, to a fire more than ordinarily deadly, the Grand 
Master directed some to be hanged and others to have their ears cut off, "pour 
encourager les autres," as the chroniclers quaintly and simply record.' Porter's 
'History of the Knights of Malta,' ii. 272. 

411 



LORD CHATHAM 

source. So far as his countrymen, or rather, their rulers, 
were concerned, they had long done their best to lose it. 
They had, in spite of constant appeals, starved and neg- 
lected it. But there was worse than this. On one side 
of the mouth of the harbour of Mahon is a site easily ren- 
dered impregnable, on the other a plain which nothing 
can secure. John Duke of Argyle had begun a fort on the 
first site, but Lord Cadogan out of hatred to him, it was 
said, destroyed it and built Fort St. Philip at a vast ex- 
pense on the second. The thing is incredible to the trav- 
eller who sees the place. If the story be true (Horace Wal- 
pole is the authority) , it is on the head of Cadogan and not 
of Byng that should be laid the loss of Minorca, a loss 
which can neither be forgotten nor forgiven. 

This tragic incident only touches Pitt's life in so far as 
it precipitated the disgrace of Newcastle. The Duke was 
indeed getting deeper and deeper. In May he declared 
that no one blamed him, for every one knew that the sea 
was not his province, and Fox had replied that as to pub- 
lic censure, his information was exactly the reverse. In 
September he could scarcely conceal from himself that he 
was being mobbed and pelted in his coach, and that his 
coachman was urged by the shouting crowd to drive his 
Grace straight to the Tower. Ballads swarmed of which 
the burden was, 'To the block with Newcastle and to the 
yard-arm with Byng.' Even the docile allegiance of the 
House of Commons can scarcely have allayed the veteran's 
rising anxiety. 'This was the year of the worst adminis- 
tration that I have seen in England,' says Walpole, though 
he was the close friend of Fox, 'for now Newcastle's in- 
capacity was allowed full play.' Fox indeed found that 
he was not admitted to real confidence or to the counsels 
of Newcastle and Hardwicke. He was therefore in a 
state of swelling discontent, ready to break away at the 

412 



HLS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

first opportunity. He declared that he had urged that a 
strong squadron should be sent for the relief of the fortress 
during the first week of March, but was overruled. The 
fall of Minorca and the storm of national fury which fol- 
lowed increased his anxiety to be out of this disastrous 
ministry. He was, we suspect, already determined not to 
meet Parliament again as Newcastle's talking puppet, pos- 
sibly his scapegoat. 

The House had risen on May 27. Two days earlier oc- 
curred an event which was to remove one of the three in- 
tellects of the Government, Fox and Hardwicke, of course, 
being the other two. Ryder, the Chief Justice of the King's 
Bench, died, and Murray at once laid claim to the succes- 
sion. This demand drove Newcastle to despair. He of- 
fered Murray exorbitant and increasing terms to remain, 
for he regarded Murray as his sole protector in the House 
of Commons against his doubtful friend Fox, and his open 
enemy, Pitt. But offers of the Duchy of Lancaster for life 
with a pension of 2000/. a year, with permission to remain 
Attorney-General at a salary of 7000/. a year, and a rever- 
sion of one of the Golden Tellerships of the Exchequer for 
his nephew Stormont, left Murray unmoved. For months 
the game of temptation was played. At the beginning of 
October the Prime Minister had raised the proposed pension 
to 6000/. a year. Murray remained firm. He stipulated, 
indeed, for more than the Chief Justiceship; he demanded 
a peerage as well; he would not take the one without the 
other; and in no case would he remain Attorney-General. 
We can imagine Newcastle's tears and caresses; they were 
in vain. Vain, too, was his attempt to fob off his rebellious 
subordinate with the reluctance of the King. Murray, in- 
deed, hinted that when he became a private member of 
the House of Commons he might go into Opposition. We 
may be sure, at any rate, that he had no intention of 

413 



LORD CHATHAM 

facing an angry nation and Parliament in defence of New- 
castle and the loss of Minorca. This hint probably clinched 
the matter. Newcastle capitulated; though, said Fox, from 
1 wilful trifling, ' he deferred the performance of his promise 
as long as possible. 1 It was not till the eve of the Duke's 
fall that, on November 8, Murray was sworn in as Chief 
Justice and created a Peer as Lord Mansfield. 

What glimpses are there meanwhile of Pitt? He had 
[ 7 s6 just got possession of Hayes, and was there in May, build- 
ing and improving, as usual, but speaking brilliantly on the 
Militia Bill in the House, so brilliantly as to earn a patron- 
ising note of approval from Bute, beginning 'My worthy 
friend'; an indication that the bond between Pitt and the 
young Court was now close. Indeed, Pitt seems now to 
have been the principal adviser of that increasingly power- 
ful connection. 

Potter, whom Pitt had come to describe as 'one of the 
best friends I have in the world,' wrote to Pitt, ten days 
after Ryder's death, conveying the news from an inspired 
source that if Murray went on the bench Newcastle would 
invite Pitt to join the Government, for he could repair the 
loss in no other way. But he adds, shrewdly enough, that 
the Duke was evidently ignorant of his own strength, for if 
he had to rely on Lyttelton and Dupplin (then Joint Pay- 
master of the Forces) alone, though the debates would no 
doubt be shorter, he would not, such was the temper of the 
House, lose a single vote. He added that, in his judgment, 
the Opposition had not made themselves popular by their 
conduct, because of the fear of invasion. Hanover treaties 
and Hanover troops had become popular; opposition to 
them must be wrong 'when we are ready to be eat up by 
the French.' 2 

1 Fox to Ellis, July 12, 1756. Holland House MSS. 

2 Chatham Corr., i. 158. 

414 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

But these anticipations were premature, for the struggle 
with Murray lasted, as we have seen, from May till No- 
vember. So that Pitt had leisure to squander on his im- 
provements and to receive his eldest son John on John's 
entrance into the world. But his eye was vigilantly fixed 
on the distresses of the country. 'Quas regio in terris 
nostri non plena laboris?' he writes to George Grenville 
(June 5, 1756). 'It is an inadequate and a selfish con- 
solation, but it is a sensible one, to think that we share 
only in the common ruin, and not in the guilt of having 
left us exposed to the natural and necessary consequences 
of administration without ability or virtue.' Grenville, 
determined not to be undone, replies in a letter stuffed 
with Latin quotation. 'Distress,' rejoins Pitt (June 16, 
1756), 'infinite distress seems to hem us in on all quarters. 
I am in most anxious impatience to have the affair in the 
Mediterranean cleared up. As yet nothing is clear but 
that the French are masters there, and that probably 
many an innocent and gallant man's honour and fortune 
is to be offered up as a scapegoat for the sins of the Ad- 
ministration.' In July he paid a visit at Stowe, and in 
August he was laid up at Hayes with 'a very awkward, 
uneasy, but not hurtful' malady. 

He must have seen with poignant interest Frederick's 
fierce irruption into Saxony, but all seems absorbed in his 
anxiety for his wife and his overflowing delight at the 
birth of his son. This event occurred on October 10, at 
a moment when the ministerial crisis had become acute. 

No one in fact was willing to face even an abject 
House of Commons with the loss of Minorca on his back. 
Newcastle was near the end of his tether. Murray had 
gone. Whether Chief Justice or not, he was determined 
to be out of the ministry; and if disappointed of his just 
claim to the Bench he was not likely to face a storm on 

415 



LORD CHATHAM 

behalf of the Minister who had refused it. Murray had 
gone, Fox was going; for his chagrin was patent, and 
Newcastle 'treated him rather like an enemy whom he 
feared than 'as a minister whom he had chosen for his 
assistant.' He was no better used by the King. The 
Duke, moreover, was at war with the waxing power of 
Leicester House. With this Court indeed he managed to 
patch up a hollow peace at the expense of Fox; offending 
one Court and not appeasing the other. But that did not 
help him to an agent in the House of Commons. 

And worse was still to come, disaster followed on dis- 
aster. To a nation freshly smarting with the fall of Mi- 
norca there came tidings of catastrophe from the East and 
the West. In June Calcutta had been captured by Sura- 
jah Dowlah, followed by the horrors of the Black Hole, 
which still linger in the proverbial dialect of this country. 
Then in August fell Oswego, the most important British 
fortress in North America. Situated on Lake Ontario it 
was a permanent menace to the French, for British com- 
mand of that lake would mean the separation of Canada 
from Louisiana. Montcalm, a general of high merit, who 
has had the singular good -fortune to leave a name con- 
secrated by the common veneration of friend and foe, had 
arrived to take the command of the French forces in Canada. 
Two months after landing he marched on Oswego, and, in- 
vesting it with a greatly superior force, soon compelled it 
to capitulate. Its garrison of 1400 men surrendered as 
prisoners of war. 1 A hundred pieces of artillery and great 
stores of ammunition fell into the hands of the French. 
The forts, three in number, and the vessels were burned. 
It was a real triumph for the French, and a proportionate 
disaster for their foes. 'Such a shocking affair has never 
found a place in English annals,' wrote one American 

1 'Montcalm and Wolfe,' i. 413. 
416 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

officer. 'The loss is beyond account; but the dishonour 
done his Majesty's arms is infinitely greater.' 'Oswego,' 
wrote Horace Walpole, 'is of ten times more importance 
even than Minorca.' 

Scarcely less consternation was caused in England, 
where the news arrived on September 30. People there 
were getting dazed with disaster, and the men who ruled 
became more and more abhorrent. Already, on Septem- 
ber 2, Newcastle had written to the Chancellor that people 
were becoming outrageous in the North of England, and 
that a petition was being largely signed in Surrey demand- 
ing 'justice against persons however highly dignified or 
distinguished.' This, he adds drily, may mean you or 
me, or 'perhaps somebody more highly dignified and dis- 
tinguished than either of us.' 1 Who could be found to bear 
such a burden of shame and ignominy, and affront the 
storm that threatened to burst at once in overwhelming 
popular fury? 

Not Fox, undaunted though he might be. Like the 
condottiere that he was, he did not heed hard knocks 
provided the pay were good. But here he was defrauded 
of his deserts, of the promised confidence of the King and 
his minister. For Newcastle had betrayed him to the last; 
the magpie cunning of that old caitiff paralysed every arm 
that might have defended him. When it came to the 
point he could not bring himself to part with his monopoly 
of patronage, and of power as he understood power. He 
was like a drowning miser with his treasure on him, who 
will not part with his gold to save his life. So the Duke 
preferred to sink with all his influence rather than take the 
chance of floating without it. First he set the King against 
Fox. The Duke had tried to appease Leicester House by 
getting the appointment of Groom of the Stole for Bute. 

1 Newcastle to Hardwicke, Sept. 2, 1756. Add. MSS. 35416. 

417 



LORD CHATHAM 

The King, suspecting Bute's intimacy with the Princess, 
detested that fascinating courtier. So Newcastle, to di- 
vert from himself the King's wrath at having to make this 
nomination, told His Majesty that Fox made Bute's ap- 
pointment a condition of his retaining the seals; and then 
without telling Fox that his name had thus been men- 
tioned to the Sovereign, informed him that the King was 
exasperated against him. 1 

Then there arose the eternal question of patronage. 
Fox had been promised by the King himself that on be- 
coming Secretary of State he should have the conduct of 
the House of Commons with all that that involved. But 
Newcastle could not bring himself to fulfil the royal pledges 
or his own. When the list of the Prince of Wales's house- 
hold was published, Fox saw in it the names of eight or 
ten members of Parliament as to whom he had never been 
even consulted. Newcastle moreover, as Fox asserted, 
broke a solemn promise that Fox's nephew, Lord Digby, 
should be included. A still greater affront was that he 
told Fox that he destined a vacant seat at the Board of 
Trade for a person whom he was not at liberty to mention. 
More than this, he took occasion to remind Fox of a former 
offer to make way for Pitt if it were for the King's service, 
and Fox again readily agreed. All this took place on Sep- 
tember 30. 2 Such an insulting and accumulated want of 
confidence between the leaders of the two Houses was not 
to be tolerated, and Fox wrote at once to Bubb that things 
were going ill. The final explosion was caused by the ex- 
clusion of Digby, which was notified to Fox on October 5. 
The King, said the Duke, refused this nomination peremp- 

1 Fox to Kildare. This, an undated narrative among the Holland House 
MSS., seems to me the best statement from Fox's point of view. From Lord 
Kildare's reply it is evident that it was written and dispatched towards the end 
of November, 1756. 

2 Narrative to Kildare. 

418 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

torily and bitterly, but had said that, if the Duke himself 
pressed it, he would yield to oblige the Duke. On receiving 
this letter, Fox wrote a furious letter to Stone, Newcastle's 
secretary. The draft of a letter commonly reveals much 
more of the writer's mind than the letter itself, and the 
draft of this is fortunately preserved. 1 'I do not know,' 
wrote Fox, 'whether I am to imagine from hence that the 
negotiation with Mr. Pitt is far advanced, but I am told 
it is not begun. In these circumstances, dear Sir, I must 
beg you to stop it. I retract all good-humoured dealing. 
I may be turned out, and I suppose shall. But I will not 
be used like a dog without having given the least provoca- 
tion (suppose I should say with the utmost merit to those 
who use me so) and be like that dog a spaniel. I do not 
consent that Mr. Pitt should have my place, and promise 
to be in good -humour or even on any terms with those 
who give it him. 2 Fox was in a blind fury, but sensibly 
expunged all this from the letter he sent. To Welbore 
Ellis, his confidant, he wrote: 'The King has carried his 
displeasure to me beyond common bounds, and I vow to 
God I don't guess the reason. The Duke of Newcastle, 
instead of growing better, has outdone himself, and show'd 
me the Prince's establishment on which eight members of 
the House of Commons are plac'd whose names he never 
mention'd to me, and he had the assurance to make a 
merit of shewing me the List after it was fix'd with the 
King. He has been Fool enough to ask my consent, and 
to intend to offer my place to Mr. Pitt without (as I be- 
lieve) trying whether or no he will accept it. This makes 
it necessary for me to take a step in which my view is to 

get out of court and never come into it again If you 

think it worth while to get up very early to-morrow morn- 

1 Fox to Stone, October 7, 1756. Holland House MSS. 

2 lb. 

419 



LORD CHATHAM 

ing you may be at Holland House before I go to Lady 
Yarmouth, to desire and humbly advise H.M. to conclude 
the Treaty with Mr. Pitt, promising my assistance in a 
subaltern employment, and shewing the impossibility of 
my appearing and my determination not to appear in 
the H. of Commons as Secy, of State.' 1 While he was 
writing this, Newcastle was dispatching a note giving way 
as to Digby's nomination, 2 with much the same effect as a 
cup of cold water poured with the best intentions on a 
burning city. 

Whether with or without the companionship of Ellis, 
Fox went straight to Lady Yarmouth. She was out. 
Newcastle had already sent her a note enclosing Fox's 
resignation, and assuring her that Fox was bringing it to 
her for transmission to the King. 3 When Fox found her, 
later in the day, and handed her his paper, she denied any 
idea of Pitt ever having been suggested to the King, but 
besought him to reconsider his determination. 'Monsieur 
Fox, vous etes trop honnete homme pour quitter a present. 
S'il y avait quatre ou cinq mois avant que le Parlement 
s'assemble; a la fin de la session vous ferez ce que vous 
voudrez, mais a present de jeter tout en confusion! Re- 
gardez a. la position des affaires. Non, je n'excuse pas le 
Due de Newcastle; e'est dur, e'est penible, mais quand 
vous aurez pense un peu au Roi, a la patrie, vous con- 
tinuerez cette session,' perhaps the only articulate utter- 
ance of Lady Yarmouth that we possess. 4 Failing in this, 
she begged at least that Grenville might hand the resigna- 
tion to the King instead of herself. Fox agreed to this. 5 

Fox's note to Newcastle was terse and sombre: 

1 Fox to Ellis. H. H. MSS., Oct. 12, 1756. 

2 Newcastle to Fox, Oct. 12, 1756. H. H. MSS. 

3 Newcastle to Lady Yarmouth, Oct. 13. Add. MSS. 32868. 

4 Fox to Dighy, Oct. 1756. Wingfield MSS. in Hist. MSS. 

5 Orford, ii. 253. 

420 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

'My Lord, I return Your Grace many thanks for the 
letter which, not being at home, I did not receive till late 
last night, and I am much obliged to you for the contents 
of it. 

'The step I am going to take is not only necessary 
but innocent. It shall be accompany 'd with no com- 
plaint. It shall be follow'd by no resentment. I have 
no resentment. But it is not the less true that my situa- 
tion is impracticable.' 

To the King he sent a formal paper of grievance and 
resignation, which has already been printed and need not 
be repeated here. He took great pains over it, as the 
drafts testify. The substance of it was that he had been 
loyal to Newcastle, but that he had not received support 
in return, and so could not carry on the business of Govern- 
ment in the House of Commons as it should be carried on. 
But he would gladly serve the King outside the Cabinet. 
This meant that he would gladly exchange offices with 
Pitt. At the same time he told Cumberland and wrote 
to Devonshire that if Newcastle had been such a fool as 
to offer the seals to Pitt without knowing whether he would 
take them, he (Fox), to prevent the general confusion that 
would ensue, would continue for another session. No 
notice was taken of this offer. 1 It does no seem certain 
that it ever reached either Newcastle or the King. 

Granville found the King prepared for the resignation, 
and very angry with Fox for deserting him. 'Would you 
advise me to take Pitt?' he asked. 'Well, Sir!' replied 
Granville, 'you must take somebody.' 'Ah! but,' said 
the monarch, pensively, ' I am sure Pitt will not do my 
business.' The business to which the Sovereign referred 
was, of course, electoral. He considered that he had in 
various ways shown Fox great favour, and that Fox had 

1 Narrative to Kildare. 
28 421 



LORD CHATHAM 

acted ill in throwing up his office when the meeting of 
Parliament was near at hand. 

Newcastle received Fox's resignation at the Treasury. 
Though he was planning to discard Fox for Pitt, he was 
thunderstruck at finding that Fox had anticipated him. 
He hurried to Court, and found the King in good humour 
except with the resigning Secretary. His Majesty gave 
Newcastle the paper which he had received from Gran- 
ville, having underlined the passage which had mainly 
offended him: 'for want of support, and think it imprac- 
ticable for me to carry on His Majesty's affairs as they 
ought to be carried on'; and then recited, with the aid of 
Newcastle as prompter, all the favours shown to Fox. But 
the more urgent and practical question was not the in- 
gratitude of Fox, but what was to be done now that he 
had gone. The King, with that shrewd and redeeming 
touch of humour which we constantly discern in him, said 
that a sensible courtier, Lord Hyde, had told him that 
there were but three things to do. The King recited them 
thus: 'to call in Pitt, to make up with my own family, 
and, my lord, I have forgot the third.' The third probably 
related to Newcastle himself, and may therefore have been 
difficult of repetition to the Duke. But without hesita- 
tion the King empowered Newcastle to approach Pitt, and 
to tell him that if he would take office he should have a 
good reception. Pitt was also to be offered the seals, but 
not at first, on the fatuous principle on which all New- 
castle's negotiations were conducted; to hope against hope 
that the object he coveted could be got for much less than 
its value. 

But then the King asked 'the great question . . . . 
which,' says Newcastle, 'I own I could not answer: what 
shall we do if Pitt will not come ? Fox will then be worse.' 
Then the King, with still increasing acuteness, asked, 

422 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

'Suppose Pitt will not serve with you?' 'Then, Sir, I 
must go.' And so it was to end. But Newcastle would 
not without a struggle renounce the deleterious habit of 
office. He summoned Hardwicke to town for the purpose 
of approaching Pitt. He hurried to Lady Yarmouth and 
took counsel with her. All agreed that the only resource 
was Pitt, and that Hardwicke alone could sound him. 
Pitt was at Hayes, but leaving immediately for Bath. 
Time was short, the crisis acute, so Newcastle wrote, 'don't 
boggle at it.' * 

There was no boggling or hesitation on the part of the 
Chancellor: he hurried to London and saw Pitt on Tues- 
day, October 19. The interview lasted three hours and a 
half. When it was over, Hardwicke despatched a despair- 
ing note to Newcastle: ' I am just come from my conference, 
which lasted full 3 J hours. His answer is an absolute final 
negative without any reserve for further deliberation. In 
short there never was a more unsuccessful negotiator. ' 2 
In a longer letter to his son Lord Royston, Hardwicke 
added but little more. On the main point Pitt was in- 
exorable; he would have nothing to do with Newcastle. 
Hardwicke could not move him an inch. He was obdur- 
ate on 'men and measures.' 3 But 'men and measures' 
only meant Newcastle. Pitt had been repeatedly tricked 
by him; he had seen Fox repeatedly tricked by him when 
the meanest self-interest dictated honesty; he would not 
fall into the trap into which Fox had fallen; to join New- 
castle now would be to be a willing dupe, and he was 
determined to govern, if he was to govern, without this 
perpetual ambush at his side. Nor would he have any 
dealings with Fox. He thought, truly or untruly, that Fox 

1 Newcastle to Hardwicke, Oct. 15, 1756. Harris, iii. 73. 

2 Hardwicke to Newcastle, Oct. 19, 1756. Add. MSS. 32868. 

3 Harris, iii. 77. 

423 



LORD CHATHAM 

had betrayed him, and he intended to try and do without 
treachery. He wished to enter on power clear of all sus- 
picious connections, and indeed with little but the influence 
of his wife's family. So he resolved to see nothing even of 
Bute before meeting Hardwicke, and he summoned the 
Grenvilles to receive his report immediately after seeing 
Hardwicke. 1 

Pitt, however, having no access to the King and being 
anxious to communicate with him directly, made over- 
tures elsewhere. On October 21, the palace was disturbed 
by an unwonted agitation. Pages and lackeys were seen 
in sudden perturbation calling to each other that Mr. Pitt 
had arrived to see my Lady Yarmouth. Lady Yarmouth's 
position was singular enough. She had once been the de- 
clared mistress of George the Second; 'My lady Yarmouth 
the comforter,' wrote a ribald wit. 2 She still lived under 
his roof, when it was her business to keep him amused, if 
possible, during the long dull evenings. But from being a 
favourite, she had developed into an institution. Her 
apartment, immediately below the King's, was little less 
than an office. There, it was said, peerages or bishoprics 
might sometimes be bought, and some patronage was per- 
haps facilitated or dispensed. On the other hand, Lord 
Walpole declared at an earlier period that she asked for 
nothing, and that one of her principal charms with the 
King was that she did not importune him for favours. At 
any rate, persons wanting anything did well to write to 
her. Thither, too, a circumstance of much significance, 
ministers repaired before or after their audience with the 
King, to anticipate the royal disposition or to report the 
royal utterances. 'I went below stairs,' was the phrase. 
They took close counsel with the lady, she told them her 
impressions of the King's real views, and usually added 

1 Grenville Papers, i. 178. 2 Sir C. H. Williams, iii. 41. 

424 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

some shrewd observations of her own. Her action seems 
to have been wholly beneficial; she appeased jealousies, 
conciliated animosities, administered common sense, spoke 
ill of nobody, and, so far as we can judge, was eminently 
good-natured in the best sense of that tortured epithet. 
Perhaps her most useful function was that of acting as a 
conciliatory channel for those who had something to say 
to the King which they could not say themselves. Both 
Fox and Newcastle had at once hurried to her, as we have 
seen, when the crisis took place. And so Pitt now found 
it necessary to pay his first visit to her. 

He had heard perhaps that the King had said, 'I am 
sure Pitt will not do my business,' and had come to give 
soothing insinuations. But he also entertained a well- 
founded doubt as to whether he had fair play with the 
King, and whether he could trust Newcastle and Hard- 
wicke to represent him fairly to the Sovereign. 1 So he 
came to Lady Yarmouth as his only means of direct com- 
munication with the Closet, and stated his real terms, 
handing her a written list of the men he proposed for office, 
a list which still exists. 2 He would not serve with New- 
castle, but the King might find in getting rid of Newcastle 
that Hanover had other unsuspected friends. 3 But he 
also 'sent,' says Fox, 'the terms of a madman to the King.' 
They do not seem very mad to us: Ireland for Temple, the 
Exchequer for Legge, the Paymastership for George Gren- 
ville, the Irish Secretaryship for James Grenville, the 
Treasury for Devonshire. Townshend was to be Treasurer 
of the Chambers, Dr. Hay a Lord of the Admiralty, and 
places were to be found for George Townshend, Erskine, 
Lord Pomfret, and Sir Richard Lyttelton. For his col- 
league in the Secretaryship of State he proposed, most 

1 Shelburne, i. 83. 

2 Add. MSS. 35416; cf. Orford, ii. 257. 3 Orford, ii. 259. 

425 



LORD CHATHAM 

marvellous of all; Sir Thomas Robinson! The overture,: 
however, irritated the King, partly from the demands,, 
partly because it showed that people thought that he was 
influenced by Lady Yarmouth. ' Mr. Pitt, ' he said,. ' shalL 
not go to that channel any more. She does not meddle 
and shall not meddle.' * Nevertheless the hint dropped 
by Pitt was probably useful and fruitful. Pitt himself 
said afterwards that this interview put an end to the 
indecision of the King, who had remained sullen and 
passive. 2 

The next point to be noted is Pitt's second interview 
with Hardwicke. And though the minute of Hardwicke's 
conversation with Pitt on October 19 appears to be lost, 
we have his record 3 of this second meeting between them 
on October 24, which he read to the King on October 26, 
and which contains the main points at issue. 

Hardwicke began by telling Pitt that he had sent for 
him at the King's command; that he had on October 20 
faithfully narrated to the King all that had passed at the 
interview of October 19, and that the King had summoned 
him on October 23, the day previous to the present meet- 
ing, in order to send the following message — 

'The King is of opinion that what has been suggested 
is not for his and the public service.' 

Pitt thereupon bowed and said that His Majesty did 
him the greatest honour in condescending to return any 
answer to anything that came from him. He then re- 
peated the message word for word, and desired Hardwicke 
to bear in mind that all that he had suggested was by way 
of objection; that he had not suggested anything affirm* 
alive as to measures of any kind. Hardwicke replied that 
he had repeated to the King exactly what had passed, and 

1 Leadam, 445 note. Orford, ii. 259. 2 Shelburne, i. 83 note. 

3 Add. MSS. 35870. 'Powis Ho., October 24, 1756. Sunday night.' 

426 



HIS EARLY LIEE AND CONNECTIONS 

recapitulated the five heads under which Pitt had summed 
up the previous conversation. 

'i. That it was impossible for him to serve with the 
Duke of Newcastle. 

4 2. That he thought enquiries into the past measures 
absolutely necessary, that he thought it his duty to take 
a considerable share in them, and could not lay himself 
under any obligation to depart from that. 

' To this I said that the King was not against a fair and 
impartial enquiry. 

'3. That he thought his duty to support a Militia Bill, 
and particularly that of the last session. 

1 1 told him that the King and his ministers were not 
against a Militia Bill. 

' 4. That the affair of the Hanoverian soldier * he thought 
of great importance ; that what had been done ought to be 
examined, and, he thought, censured. 

'5. That if he came into His Majesty's service, he 
thought it necessary, in order to serve him, and to support 
his affairs, to have such powers as belonged to his station, 
to be in the first concert and concoction of measures, and 
to be at liberty to propose to His Majesty himself anything 
that occurred to him for his service, originally, and with- 
out going through any other minister.' 

Pitt, who was evidently disappointed, acknowledged 
the accuracy of Hardwicke's recital, and desired to know 
if the message from the King was an answer to the whole) . 

1 This poor Hanoverian victim, as completely as Andersen's Tin Soldier, 
has melted into nothingness. But he once caused a mighty stir. He bought 
four handkerchiefs, and by mistake, as was universally conceded, took the 
whole piece, which contained six. Yet he was put in prison on a charge of 
theft. His commanding officer demanded his enlargement. Failing in this 
attempt, he obtained a warrant from Holdernesse for his release. The whole 
country was aflame in an instant with the old hostility to German mercenaries, 
Holdernesse was severely threatened, and the innocent soldier cruelly flogged. 
See Orford, ii. 248-9. 

427 



LORD CHATHAM 

Hardwicke replied that it was the King's answer in the 
King's own words, 1 and that he could not take on himself 
to explain it; but that he understood it as an answer to 
everything that had been conveyed by Mr. Pitt to the King. 

To this Pitt rejoined with thanks for the King's con- 
descension that he would say to Hardwicke, 'as from one 
private gentleman to another/ that he would not come into 
the service, in the present circumstances of affairs, upon any 
other terms for the whole world. 

' I then,' continues the Chancellor, ' said that undoubted- 
ly He must judge for himself; But I would also say to 
Him, as from Lord Hardwicke only to Mr. Pitt — 

'That, as He professed great Duty to the King & Zeal 
for his Service, & I dared to say had it; That as He had 
expressed an Inclination to come into his Majesty's service, 
in order really to assist in the support of his Government; 

' That as He was a Man of Abilities & knowledge of the 
World; That, as Men of Sense, who wish the End, must 
naturally wish the means ; why would He at the same time 
make the thing impracticable? 

'To This He answered that he would say to me in the 
same private manner That he was surprized that it should 
be thought possible for Him to come into an Employment 
to serve with the D. of Newcastle, under whose Adminis- 
tration the things he had so much blamed had happened, 
& against which the Sense of the Nation so strongly ap- 
peared; & I think he added, — which Administration could 
not possibly have lasted, if he had accepted. 

1 Strangely enough there is a different answer appended to this report. 

'That H. M. had been desirous, in this time of difficulty, to have the as- 
sistance of Mr. Pitt in his service, and for that purpose to consider him and 
those connected with him in a proper manner. That H. M. continues in the 
same disposition, tho' what has been suggested by Mr. Pitt will not in the 
King's opinion form a system for carrying on H. M.'s service.' 

This may have been the first draft, and it may have been found, as usual, 
that the less said the better. 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

' In answer to That I said some general things in the 
same sense with what I had mentioned on that head on 
Tuesday last. 

'He then rose up & we parted with great personal 
Civility on both sides.' 

Meanwhile Newcastle, proscribed by Pitt and spurned 
by Fox, knew not whither to turn. He broke out in a 
wail against them to the Chancellor, the keeper of his 
conscience even more than of the King's. 'My dearest 
Lord,' he writes (October 20, 1756), 'tho' a consciousness 
of my own innocence and an indifference as to my own 
situation may, and I hope in God will, support me against 
all the wickedness and ingratitude which I meet with, yet 
your Lordship cannot think that I am unmindful of or 
senseless to the great indignity put upon me by these two 
gentlemen.' Newcastle in the character of a Christian 
martyr, the prey of heathen raging furiously, has some- 
thing humorous and incongruous about it, were the atti- 
tude less abject. But in a sentence or two he returns to a 
more familiar character. 'Allow me only to suggest to 
your Lordship the necessity of making the King see that 
the whole is a concert between Mr. Pitt and Mr. Fox. The 
news and principles upon which they act are the same, 
viz., to make themselves necessary, and masters of the 
King .... that the only thing Mr. Pitt alledges against 
me is the conduct of the war.' .... 'Quit before the Birth- 
day I must and will.' He goes on to consult the Chancellor 
as to whether he shall ask any favours for his relations. 1 

So the falling minister in his straits tried to play upon 
the King's two strongest passions, fear of being dominated 
and fear for Hanover. How wise Pitt was to go straight 
to Lady Yarmouth ! But Newcastle had tried other meas- 
ures as well after Fox's resignation. The very day he re- 

1 Partly given in Harris, iii. 80. 
429 



LORD CHATHAM 

ceivedi it he had hurried to his old enemy GranviHe^ now 
comfortably ensconced in the Presidency of the Council,,, 
and offered to exchange offices with him, giving him his 
friend Fox as Chancellor of the Exchequer. 1 Granville, he 
remembered, had once been willing to face far greater 
hazards with Pulteney. But Granville was ten years older; 
he had, to use his own expression, put on his nightcap; 
and he laughed the suppliant Duke out of the room. ' I 
will be hanged a little before I take your place,' he said, 
not perhaps without some relish for his chief's terror and 
distress, 'rather than a little after.' But he added more 
gravely that 'we must determine either to give Mr. Fox 
what he wants, or to take in Mr. Pitt; who,' Newcastle adds 
piteously, 'will not come.' 2 Then Newcastle tried Egmont 
and Halifax. Egmont was willing to take the seals with a 
British peerage. But it was in the House of Commons that 
strength was wanted. No such strength was to be found 
without Pitt or Fox. Dupplin, one of the Paymasters, an 
able man of business and much in Newcastle's confidence, 
said broadly and truly, 'Fox and Pitt need only sit still 
and laugh, and we must walk out of the House!' And yet 
the House of Commons was almost unanimous in devotion 
to the minister. Was there ever so strange a situation? 

In view of this last fact Hardwicke urged Newcastle 
to hold on; and Lyttelton, to inspirit him, offered to ac- 
cept any office. This well-intentioned proposal failed to 
animate the Duke, though it was gratefully recognised. 
There was nothing left but the rank and file, ardent sup- 
porters with nothing to support. The Government was 
doomed. 

Instructions from counties and boroughs were coming 
up as in the days of the impeachment of Walpole. Ad- 

1 Newcastle to Hardwicke, Oct. 13, 5 o'clock, 1756. Add. MSS. 32868, 
f. 251. 2 Ib.« 

43° 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

dresses were presented to the Throne. The country was 
thoroughly roused. And its hopes and gaze were fixed 
solely on Pitt, a private member, untried in affairs, with 
scarce a follower in parliament. He, at any rate, had not 
failed, a negative merit indeed, but one which he alone of 
the leading statesmen of the time could claim. 

Newcastle was left alone with Hardwicke. Around 
them that desert had begun to form which portends the 
fall of a ministry; though their faithful Commons still 
awaited their bidding in silence. And at last the old Duke 
realised that he must resign, but determined that Hard- 
wicke should resign too, perhaps to make his own resigna- 
tion regretted, perhaps because he would not leave behind 
him an asset of such value. ' My dearest, dearest Lord, ' 
he wrote, 'you know how cruelly I am treated and indeed 
persecuted by all those who now surround the King.' 
Hardwicke's friendship, he said, was now his only comfort, 
Hardwicke's resignation would be his honour, glory, and 
security. 'But, my dearest Lord, it would hurt me ex- 
tremely if yours should be long delayed.' And indeed, 
Hardwicke, to the regret of all, consented to leave the 
woolsack and follow his friend. Newcastle was shrewd 
enough to know that under the existing conditions in parlia- 
ment he could scarcely fail soon to return to office. But 
Hardwicke did not return. 

When the King was sure that Newcastle was really 
going, he sent for Fox and bade him try if Pitt would 
join him. 'The Duke of Newcastle whom you hate will 
retire,' said the Sovereign; 'try your hand and see what 
you can do with Pitt.' * Next day Fox went to the Prince's Oct. 28, i 75 6 
levee at Saville House, and engaged Pitt in close and 
animated conversation for some twenty minutes. ' Mr. Pitt 
exceeding grave, Mr. Fox very warm. They did not seem 

1 Digby to Lord Digby, Oct. 28, 1756. Wingfield MSS. in Hist. MSS. 

431 



LORD CHATHAM 

to part amicably.' 1 Of this talk a famous fragment sur- 
vives, characteristic of political language in those days. 
'Are you going to Stowe?' asked Fox. 'I ask because I 
believe you will have a message of consequence from peo- 
ple of consequence.' 'You surprise me,' answered Pitt, 
'are you to be of the number?' 'I don't' know,' said Fox, 
taken aback. 'One likes to say things to a man of sense/ 
rejoined Pitt, ' and to men of your great sense, rather than 
to others. And yet it is difficult even to you.' Fox caught 
his hint at once. 'What! You mean that you will not 
act with me as Minister?' 'I do,' replied Pitt. But a 
moment after he felt that he had been too abrupt, and ex- 
pressed a courteous hope that Fox would take an active 
part, which his own health would not permit him to do. 2 

Was Pitt right in refusing the concurrence of Fox ? On 
that question we must allow him to be the best judge, as 
it is obvious that he did not act in heat or passion, and 
that we cannot know the situation as he did. To us now, 
viewing the poverty of his following and the useful abilities 
of Fox, it would seem that he made a palpable mistake. 
Fox would have taken the second place; as a matter of fact 
he was content to subside into the gilded subordination of 
the Paymastership. His talents as a debater were second 
only to Pitt's with the possible exception of Charles Town- 
shend's; but Townshend was only a shooting star, and did 
not, like Fox, represent the important influence of Cum- 
berland. Fox would have fought stolidly for the side he 
espoused; he had a leaning to Pitt, and shared Pitt's 
detestation of Newcastle, who was the common enemy. 
But Pitt evidently had determined that he must sever him- 
self entirely from Newcastle and Newcastle's minister in 
the House of Commons. On both these rested the taint 
of corruption and national disaster. He must, if he was. 

1 West to Newcastle, Newcastle MSS. 2 Orford, ii. 262. 

43 2 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

to keep the confidence of the country, cut himself clear 
from these personalities and their traditions. He could 
estimate the weight of odium which rested upon them 
which we cannot. He had all the facts of the case before 
him, which we have not. He knew, what we do not know 
for certain but cannot doubt, that Leicester House made the 
exclusion of Fox or of Cumberland in any form a condition 
of cordial support. He realised the weakness of his own 
parliamentary position, he well understood the value of Fox's 
co-operation, but he also knew the temper of the nation, 
and so we cannot doubt that he came to the right decision. 

In any case Fox was not to blame. He offered, and 
we think cordially offered, to co-operate with Pitt, and, 
indeed, serve under Pitt. Public spirit perhaps was not 
his main motive. He did not, he confessed, feel equal to 
the principal place. He had written in July: 'Though I 
see how T fatally things are going, as I don't know how to 
mend them, I am not unreasonable enough to wish for 
what I could not conduct.' 1 And things were much 
worse now. Moreover, he saw, as others saw, that it was 
only the combination of himself with Pitt that could keep 
out Newcastle. But in public affairs the best and fairest 
course is not to analyse motives. He made the offer, he 
made it sincerely, and must have the credit of it. 

But Pitt was inflexible. Those who had made him feel 
the weight of their proscription should feel the weight of 
his. Fox would have liked to be Paymaster. In that sub- 
ordinate but opulent post he would have been content to 
give support. But Pitt would have none of him. He 
refused him this slight favour on the mysterious ground 
that it 'would be too like Mr. Pelham in 1742.' 2 He 
would not touch Fox or Newcastle. 

1 Fox to Ellis. July 15, 1755. Holland House MSS. 

2 Narrative to Kildare. 

433 



LORD CHATHAM 

Oct. 28,1756 The day after Fox's conversation with Pitt at the 
levee, the King sent for Devonshire, and bade him form a 
ministry. This Duke was now Lord Lieutenant of Ireland 
and Fox's closest friend. The King probably hoped in 
this way to bring about the union between Pitt and Fox, 
which almost every one desired, save Pitt himself. Pitt 
himself had nominated Devonshire, but without consult- 
ing him, in the interviews with Hardwicke. Devonshire 
had written to Fox in approval of the resignation as soon 
as he had heard of it. Five days afterwards he wrote again : 
' If my friendship or assistance can be of any use you can 
command me, ' and went on to say, ' Nothing has hurt Mr. 
Pitt so much as his having shown the world that in order 
to gratify his resentment and satisfy his ambition he did 
not value the confusion or distress that he might throw 
this country into. This I own has in some degree altered 
the good opinion I had of him. ' * Devonshire therefore did 
not seem a propitious Prime Minister for Pitt. But dukes 
counted for much in those days. No one can read the 
history of those times without seeing the vast importance 
attributed to forgotten princes like Marlborough, Bedford, 
and Devonshire. 

Fox soon quarrelled with Devonshire. He considered 
that Devonshire had abandoned him. The Duke had been 
his confidential friend, and had left him to help Pitt, and 
act as Pitt's figurehead. At first he affected to approve. 
But his wrath only smouldered. On one of the eternal 
questions of patronage it broke out. Fox wrote to him a 
note of real dignity and pathos. 'The Duke of Bedford 
has just now told me that Mr. John Pitt is to kiss hands 
to-morrow for Mr. Phillipson's place'; (promised, according 
to Fox, to his friend Hamilton). 'Consider, my Lord, 
everything that has pass'd, and do not drive me from 

1 October 20, 1756. Holland House MSS. 
434 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

you. I neither mean to do you harm, nor can do you 
harm if you think. But Your Grace's own reflections will 
not please you when you have done so. ' * Devonshire was 
a weak man, but he was unconscious of blame and was 
deeply- hurt. Political friendships, when paths diverge, 
are more difficult to maintain than men themselves realise 
at the moment of separation. 

Devonshire was now sent to Pitt in the country, 2 butoct. 3 i, 1756 
found that his terms were such as the King could not be 
brought to accept. He positively declined association with 
Fox in any shape, but deigned to apologise to the Duke 
for having nominated him without previous consultation. 
It was necessary, he said, to place some great lord there 
to whom the Whigs would look up, and his partiality had 
made him presume to suggest his Grace. 3 

Then the King, refusing Pitt's terms, and aware that 
he had been misinformed as to Fox's language about Bute, 
sent for Fox and offered him the government. 'I was 
never dishonest, rash, or mad enough for half an hour to 
think of undertaking it,' says Fox. 4 And again, ' I am not 
capable of it,' and goes on to give the reason. 'Richelieu, 
were he alive, could not guide the councils of a nation, if 
(which would be my case) he could not from November 
to April have above two hours in the four-and-twenty to 
think of anything but the House of Commons.' 5 If that 
were Fox's need in 1756, it is difficult to imagine the kind 
of physical and intellectual combination that he would 
have thought adequate to the stress of affairs in the twen- 
tieth century. But in spite of Fox's private opinion thus 
expressed, his friend Walpole records that he offered at 
the worst to take the Treasury and go to the Tower if it 
would save his Sovereign from having 'his head shaved.' 

1 Holland House MSS. 2 Bubb, 389. 3 Orford, ii. 263. 

* Narrative to Kildare. 5 Bedford Corresp. ii. 210. 

435 



LORD CHATHAM 

J Ah!' replied the King with his usual shrewdness, 'if you 
go to the Tower I shall not be long behind you. ' i 

Then the distracted monarch, at the instigation of Fox, 
tried the fatal expedient of an Assembly of Notables, and 
summoned all the leading nobles and commoners who were 
at hand to meet at Devonshire House. 2 But this meeting 
never took place, for Devonshire postponed or got rid of 
it. It was to have recommended that Devonshire should 
have the Treasury, Fox the Exchequer, and Legge be 
content with a peerage. Pitt himself was to have the seals, 
with carte blanche for his other friends and dependents. 
Temple was to be First Lord of the Admiralty. 3 

Fox declares that Devonshire put an end to this plan 
by positively refusing the Treasury. 4 Holdernesse sent 
word to Newcastle that les Renardins (the followers of 
Fox) were less sanguine. 5 And indeed, on November 4, 
the day after that fixed for the assembly, Devonshire went 
in to the King and came out from his audience haying 
accepted the Treasury. Bubb says that he stipulated for 
Fox as Chancellor of the Exchequer. 6 This is at least 
doubtful. 'This question,' Fox afterwards wrote, 'I beg 
may be asked: whether at the time his Grace did take it 
with Legge I was not pressing him strongly to another 
thing, viz., to offer to take it with me. I pressed this even 
to ill-humour at his own house with Grenville at night. 
He refused absolutely, and the next morning what he would 

1 Orford, ii. 266. 

2 See the summonses in the Holland House MSS. For example, that to the 
Duke of Marlborough. 'Nov. 2, 1756. My dear Lord, H. M. desires Your 
Grace would without fail be in town to-morrow evening. You shall find at 
Marlbro' House a summons to the place of meeting, and I leave to Mr. Hamil- 
ton to acquaint Your Grace more fully than I have time to do with the inten- 
tion of it. Adieu. The D. of Bedford is kept in town and all great Lords 
within reach are sent to.' 

3 Narrative to Kildare. 4 lb. 

5 Holdernesse to Newcastle, Nov. 2, 1756. Add. MSS. 32868. 

6 Bubb, 390. 

43 6 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

not take with me he took with Legge. ' * This would seem 
conclusive, were it not that Bubb evidently had his informa- 
tion from Fox at the time; but politicians are prone to 
illusions on the subject of office. In any case, Devonshire 
left the Closet First Lord of the Treasury with Legge as 
Chancellor of the Exchequer; the man with whom two 
days before he had refused under any circumstances to 
serve, 2 and whom the King had absolutely refused to take. 
Fox and Bedford were in the anteroom as he came out, and 
were thunderstruck. Bedford broke into passionate ex- 
postulation; Fox scented an intrigue. However, the deed 
was done. 3 

Fox says that Devonshire offered him, and he refused, 
the Pay Office. 4 This is difficult to believe, and does not 
accord with his other statements that he had offered to 
serve in a subordinate capacity and been refused. More- 
over, it was the office for which he always hankered, with 
its vast profits and safe obscurity, as compared with the 
Spartan frugality and dangerous prominence of the Secre- 
taryship of State. 5 

As to the intrigue, Fox's instinct did not deceive him. 
The fact was that Horace Walpole, having heard of the 
scheme of the Notables, saw at once that it must put an 
end to the new arrangement, as it was one that Pitt could 
not accept. Walpole feared no doubt that, in case of 
failure, Newcastle, the object of his special detestation ; 
might return to office. So he sent his cousin Conway to 
alarm the Duke of Devonshire, who consequently sup- 
pressed the meeting, and who went himself, as we have 

1 Fox to Marlborough, 1756. Holland House MSS. 

2 Bedford Corresp. ii. 208. 3 Orford, ii. 269. 

4 Bedford Corresp. ii. 210. 

5 The salary and allowances of Secretary of State were £2680, as appears 
from a paper of Fox's. But there was also £3000 for Secret Service which 
Fox appears to reckon as salary. H. H. MSS. 

29 437 



LORD CHATHAM 

seen, to the King to accept office. 1 Horace might well 
pique himself on his powers of intrigue or duplicity, for a 
week before he had spontaneously written to Fox to say 
that he heard that the King and Lady Yarmouth were 
persuaded that Fox would not take the Treasury, but he 
hoped they were wrong. 2 

The new First Lord of the Treasury may have resisted 
having Legge as his Chancellor of the Exchequer, but was 
easily overborne. What is more difficult to understand is 
the King's nominating Legge, whom he detested. It was 
a rude shock for Fox, who had planned the meeting of 
Notables and framed the scheme it was to advise. Hence- 
forth he controlled himself no more, and became the sleep- 
less enemy of the new administration, which can be no 
matter of surprise. Pitt had made his total exclusion as 
absolute a condition as that of Newcastle, and Fox after 
his warm offers of co-operation and assistance could not 
but be bitterly mortified. He believed, perhaps justly, 
that the proscription laid on him proceeded from Leicester 
House. 3 Henceforth during the short life of the new gov- 
ernment he plotted and planned against it, inspiring 'The 
Test,' a new paper under an old designation, with venom- 
ous articles, and ready to form alternative administrations 
at a moment's notice. 4 

One great difficulty, the King's repugnance to Legge, 
had been surmounted one does not know how; but there 
were still minor obstacles. The whole arrangement was 
odious to the Sovereign: he could not bear even to turn 
the first page of Devonshire's appointments. Pitt, who was 
to succeed Newcastle in the Southern department, wished 
to exchange this for the Northern. The King objected, for 

i Orford, ii. 268. 

2 Holland House MSS. H. Walpole to Fox, Oct. 27, 1756. 

3 Fox to Bedford, Nov. 23, 1756. * H. H. MSS. 

438 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

the Northern department included Hanover, and Pitt 
eventually yielded. The new Secretary, as we have seen, 
wished for Sir Thomas Robinson, his old butt, as a col- 
league, on the singular ground that he knew nothing of 
the office he was undertaking, and required Sir Thomas's 
guidance. 1 Pitt had compared Robinson to a jack-boot; 
but personal opinions vary according to points of view ; Sir 
Thomas might be contemptible as a leader, but useful as 
a dry-nurse. Holdernesse however remained. Then over 
every petty office, cofferer ships, masterships of the Wardrobe, 
keeperships of the jewels, treasurerships of the Household, 
there was snarling and struggling as of dogs over bones. 
Bedford was secured as Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, main- 
ly, it would appear, through the agency of Fox, who wished 
to secure as many ministerial posts as possible for his 
friends, and who was in hopes that the Duke would trav- 
erse Pitt. Bedford cared little for office; perhaps not much 
for Fox. His political passions were inspired by his per- 
sonal hatreds, of Newcastle now, as later of Pitt. 2 But 
Fox, aided by the Duchess's ambition, prevailed. Amid 
these changes one provokes a smile; Bubb was as usual 
dismissed. 

But the greatest and most grotesque disability lay with 
Pitt himself. After all his struggles to be in the position 
of forming a Ministry, he had no Ministry to produce. He 
could not fill a fraction of the offices. His personal fol- 
lowers, all told, hardly exceeded a dozen. When he had 
provided for the Grenvilles, Potter, and Legge, he had 
scarcely any one to name. So this ministry was doomed 
from the beginning. Pamphleteers could not fail to ob- 
serve Pitt's predicament. One lampoon, in the form of a 

1 Narrative to Kildare. 

2 Bedford Corr., ii. 170, 220. Bedford to Fox, Nov. 17, 1755 (H. H. MSS.). 
Grenville Papers, iv. 251. 

439 



LORD CHATHAM 

royal degree, 'Given at our imperial seat at Hayes,' and 
countersigned 'John Thistle,' (a premature allusion to 
Bute) , sets forth : ' We will that you give lucrative employ- 
ments to all Our Brethren, uncles, cousins, relations and 
namesakes.' * Outside this category Pitt's subordinates 
were mostly the friends of Newcastle or Fox, and so his 
secret enemies, or waiters upon Providence who were not 
sufficiently sure of his stability to call themselves his friends. 
Holdernesse, Pitt's colleague in the Secretaryship of State, 
and Barrington, Secretary for War, kept Newcastle fully 
informed of all that went on in the administration and 
of all that they knew. Holdernesse also sent abstracts 
of the despatches that came from abroad. 2 So that 
Pitt was betrayed from the first. Ministries formed by 
one man seldom last long under another. But ministries 
which pass between two declared enemies have not from 
the beginning any chance of life. This one was still- 
born. 

Pitt himself lay ill with the gout at Hayes; so he had 
to leave his affairs to be managed by a little clique in Lon- 
don, of which Temple of course was the chief, and which 
was in close communion with Leicester House. For every 
day Leicester House waxed and Kensington Palace waned 
in importance, as the King advanced in years. Nothing in 
the history of those days is more difficult to trace and yet 
nothing is more significant than this invisible Court of the 
Heir- Apparent, which was felt rather than seen, but towards 
which courtiers kept one anxious eye during their dutiful 
attendance on the King. All felt that the centre of power 
was shifting thither, and the uneasiness of those who wished 
to be well with both Courts was manifest and irrepressible. 
The constant anxiety of Fox to be Paymaster was largely 
due to his desire to be sheltered from the hatred of the 

1 Holland House MSS. 2 Add. MSS. 32869. 

440 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

young Court in the reign that seemed imminent. All this 
could not but increase the jealousy and irritability of the 
old Sovereign, at a time when he was undergoing a new 
Ministry most repulsive to him. Distasteful as it was in 
almost every respect, what was perhaps most abhorrent 
was the consciousness that it was imposed upon him by 
his daughter-in-law and her favourite, that it rested on 
their support, and was indeed the ministry of George III. 
rather than of George II. 

Bute was the object of the King's chief detestation, a 
righteous aversion if his suspicions were well founded; and 
Bute was now undisguisedly prominent in the negotiations 
for the new Government. The King treated Temple and 
his friends so ill at the levee, that the injured nobleman 
went to Devonshire to say that he feared he could not 
proceed a step further in the negotiations. On this mis- 
sion he was accompanied by Bute, for the purpose, appar- 
ently, of making the world realise that Leicester House 
and all its influence were behind Pitt. And Bute availed 
himself of this opportunity to make use of ' expressions so 
transcendently obliging to us,' writes Temple, 'and so 
decisive of the determined purposes of Leicester House 
towards us in the present or any future day, that your 
lively imagination cannot suggest to you a wish beyond 
them.' By Temple, too, he sent word to Pitt that he could 
not advise, that he left all to Pitt, determined to support 
and approve whatever Pitt decided. 1 This was the one 
element of strength to the new Government, besides Pitt 
himself. And yet, so elusive was this mysterious Court, 
that in September the town had been ringing with the 
coolness of Pitt's reception at Leicester House, more es- 
pecially by Bute. 2 The fact is that there had evidently 

1 Chatham Corr., i. 190-4. 

2 Newcastle to Hardwicke, Sept. 2, 1756. Add. MSS. 35416. 

441 



LORD CHATHAM 

been a coldness, but that the fall of Newcastle had brought 
the two together again. 1 

After Devonshire had kissed hands on November 4 there 
were however few difficulties. Temple's cold reception at 
Court, on the very day of Newcastle's resignation, which 
had made him declare with his usual arrogance to Devon- 
shire that all was over, was only a passing incident, due 
to the fact that the King could not abide the very sight 
of Temple. Pitt no doubt counselled moderation from 
Hayes, not desiring to lose the fruit of so many years for 
a slight to his relative. And so, a week after Temple's 
fiery declaration to Devonshire, the new Board of Ad- 
miralty was gazetted with Temple at its head. Three days 
before, the Board of Treasury had been declared with 
Devonshire and Legge as its chiefs. One Grenville was in- 
cluded in this. For George Grenville and Potter treas- 
urerships and paymasterships were found. There were 
indeed but few traces of Pitt's small connection in the 
Government. He, still an invalid, received his seals a 
Dec. 4 , 1756 little later. He had also to change his seat. He could 
not condescend to be re-elected for Newcastle's borough of 
Aldborough; indeed, he had held it too long. Nor indeed 
would Newcastle nominate him. 2 So now he accepted an 
olive branch from Lyttelton, who shared the control of 
Okehampton with the Duke of Bedford, and generously 
named his old friend and recent foe. 3 It may have been 
that Pitt was desirous of cutting the last link with New- 
castle before entering upon office, and had deferred receiv- 
ing the seals till he was independent. Be that as it may, 

1 Fox to Digby. Wingfield MSS. in Hist. MSS. 

2 'As your Lordship is of opinion that I cannot (which is firmly my own) 
rechuse Mr. Pitt,' &c. Newcastle to Hardwicke, Nov. 3, 1756. 

8 'Do you know that Sir George now Lord Lyttelton, who had engaged 
with the Duke of Bedford for one and one at Okehampton, named Pitt to His 

Grace as the man to be chosen in his room?' Pox to , Dec. 14, 1756 

(H. H. MSS.). 

442 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

he was only to hold them four months. During most of 
that time he was ill, during all of it he was surrounded by 
conspiracies, and he was soon intrigued out of office, though 
he never actually vacated it. But his short term had 
taught him one priceless lesson; that genius and public 
spirit were not enough, that a practical and even sordid 
leaven was required, and that if he would not do the neces- 
sary work of political adjustment himself, he must find 
somebody to do it for him, or give up all idea of being a 
powerful Minister. 

It has been thought well to narrate at length the cir- 
cumstances of the final breakdown of the King's veto on 
Pitt's accession to office and the struggle which preceded 
it; partly because some of the documents are new, partly 
because it is a curious picture of character and intrigue, 
partly because it is the fifth and culminating act of this 
long drama. 



LORD CHATHAM 



CHAPTER XXII 

BUT with this Government we have nothing to do. 
We have reached our limits. The youth of Pitt 
has passed, his apprenticeship is over, he has now his foot 
in high office, he is soon to be supreme. The weary period 
of proscription and conflict has come to an end, he is 
henceforth to command where he has obeyed, and he is 
to raise his country to a singular height of glory and power. 
That splendid period is beyond the scope of this book, 
which only records the ascent and the toil; the lustre of 
achievement and reward require a separate chronicle. 
The next scenes require a broader canvas and brighter 
colours. 

But before we leave him let us try and realise his 
appearance. When we read about any one we naturally 
wish to know what manner of man he was in the flesh. 
In this case we seem but scantily provided with portraits. 
We have glanced at the one by Hoare, to the accuracy 
of which Pitt himself bears emphatic testimony. Of this 
one Hoare painted several replicas, one of the worst of 
which, very bilious in colouring, is in the National Portrait 
Gallery. There is another at Orwell which seems to have 
more force in it; it could not have less. The original 
represents a comely, graceful and elegant being without 
a symptom of anything but comeliness, grace and elegance, 
and might be the portrait of any man of fashion of the 
time. Great men have sometimes piqued themselves on 
being dandies, and it may have been this air which recom- 

444 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

mended the picture to its subject. This portrait, of which 
the large engraving, containing only the head, is infinitely 
better than the original, duly arrived at Stowe. Thence 
at the dispersal of that great collection it passed to Drayton, 
having been purchased by Sir Robert Peel, and has lately 
found a final home at Pittsburg. 

There is another portrait by Hoare, at full length, in 
the coronation robes which Pitt never can have worn, which 
was painted for the Corporation of Bath ten years after 
that for Temple. It leaves no special impression. There 
was a portrait by Reynolds at Belvoir. But that, alas! 
disappeared with so much else in the great fire which 
ravaged that noble structure. Towards the end of his life 
(in 1772) he was painted in peer's robes by Brompton. The 
engraving of this is at full length, but the picture itself is a 
kitcat, so that it was probably cut down. This picture is at 
Chevening, and Lord Sidmouth, if we are not mistaken, 
owns a replica or another version of this picture. Pitt's 
grand-daughter, Lady Hester Stanhope, who was brought 
up with it, says that it is the best portrait of him. As she 
was only two years old when he died, her testimony, though 
given with confidence, has no personal value ; but she had 
relations who may have told her. She piqued herself on her 
resemblance to him. But no value is to be attached to the 
utterances of this vain and crazy woman, unless one can 
believe, which is difficult, that she repeated faithfully 
what more trustworthy people had told her. However, this 
portrait may well be the best, where the other is so poor. 
It is in itself impressive, representing a solemn, noble, 
melancholy figure, such as Chatham must have been in 
his last cheerless decade. 

There are more busts. There is one of him in youth, 
perhaps at five-and-twenty, handsome, bright, alert, with a 
^mile that is almost saucy. The original of this was, it 

445 



LORD CHATHAM 

is believed, also at Stowe; also, perhaps, purchased by 
Sir Robert Peel. There is more than one by Wilton. 
One, dated 1759, grim and masterful, with a touch of scorn, 
the man himself at his time of power. There are others 
of him in old age, with less expression, ponderous and 
saturnine; they are posthumous, and dated 1781. One of 
these is at Dropmore, another at Belvoir, another at 
Lowther. 

There are probably other portraits or busts, but these are 
all that are known to the present writer. 

His appearance at his best must have been extremely 
attractive. Tall and slender, 'his figure genteel and 
commanding,' he had cultivated all the arts of grace, 
gesture and dramatic action. 'Graceful in motion,' says 
his reluctant nephew, ' his eye and countenance would have 
conveyed his feelings to the deaf. ' 1 All authorities dwell on 
the magic of his eye. His eyes, said his grand-daughter, 
presumably on family tradition, were grey, but by candle- 
light seemed black from the intensity of their expression. 
When he was angry or earnest no one could look him in 
the face. No one indeed seems to have been able to abide 
the terrors of his glance. 

Of his manners and conversation in private life we know 
singularly little. Chesterfield gives us perhaps the best 
glimpse. ' He had manners and address ; but one might 
discern through them too great a consciousness of his own 
superior talents. He was a most agreeable and lively com- 
panion in social life, and had such a versatility of wit that 
he could adapt it to all sorts of conversation.' Of his early 
powers of fascination we have an authentic instance. He 
was seen walking with the Prince of Wales in the gardens 
at Stowe, and Cobham, watching them with anxiety, ex- 
pressed some apprehension of Pitt's persuading the Prince 

1 Camelford. 
446 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

to adopt some measures of which Cobham disapproved. A 
Mr. Belson said that the interview could not be long. 
'You don't know Mr. Pitt's power of insinuation,' said 
Cobham. ' In a very short quarter of an hour he can 
persuade anyone of anything.' 

Butler, 'the Reminiscent,' who had this anecdote from 
Belson himself, goes on to say that 'as a companion in 
festive moments, Mr. Pitt was enchanting.' He also quotes 
Wilkes, who was a good judge of social qualifications. 
'Mr. Pitt, by the most manly sense and the fine sallies of 
a warm and sportive imagination, can charm the whole 
day, and, as the Greek said, his entertainments please even 
the day after they are given.' But, after all, these must 
have been rare occasions, as Pitt does not seem to have 
seen much of society, for his health kept him a recluse ; and 
as years went on he seems to have found it both irksome 
and impolitic to see much of mankind. We fancy that he 
was a man, like his son, of small and intimate companies; 
partly from a haughty aloofness, partly because he could 
not partake of the pleasures of the table. 

'As a private man,' says Lord Camelford, 'he had 
especially in his youth every talent to please when he 
thought it worth while to exert his talents, which was 
always for a purpose, for he was never natural. His good 
breeding never deserted him unless when his insolence 
intended to offend. He was, however, soon spoilt by 
flattery, which gave him the humours of a child. He was 
selfish even to trifles in his own family and amongst his 
intimates to the forgetting the preferences due to the other 
sex, of which I have heard many ridiculous instances; but 
this was much owing to a state of health which made him 
fretful, at the same time that it called his attention to his 
own person. When I first saw him he was intemperate 
towards his servants full as much as my own father, but 

447 



LORD CHATHAM 

it is to his honour that when he owed a better example 
to his children he got the better of that habit. His first 
and only friendships were with Lord Lyttelton and his 
sister Ann. ' In a later passage he adds : ' He lived and 
died without a friend.' 

Camelford, it will be observed, speaks with confidence 
about Pitt's youth, of which he can have known nothing 
except from tradition, and Pitt's family traditions were not 
likely to err on the side of benignity. What he says about 
early friendships is obviously inaccurate; he is quoting 
Pitt's impulsive note of Oct. 24, 1734. 1 The Grenvilles, 
the other Lytteltons, and Gilbert West at once occur to one 
as friends to whom Pitt in youth was tenderly attached. 
We may indeed take it for granted that this curious piece 
refers to Pitt's middle life, which Camelford knew person- 
ally; but it is too interesting to be omitted here. 

His great and singular power lay in his eloquence, and 
yet even there we are left largely to the recollection and testi- 
mony of his contemporaries, for there was in those days 
no reporting as we understand it, therefore no reports. 
There are, of course, professed reports, but to these little 
credence can be attached. Dr. Johnson and a Scottish 
clergyman named Gordon wrote a great number of them, 
based on very inadequate materials, if any materials at 
all. Men carried away some noble outburst or some 
striking metaphor tingling in their ears, and repeated it. 
Others would be able to recall the line of argument, if 
indeed there was an argument to follow. But the result 
is scarcely authentic. Pitt the younger must have known, 
and he declared that no specimens of his father's eloquence 
remained Butler says that the person to whom he made 
this remark (no doubt Butler himself) begged him to read 
slowly his father's speeches on the Stamp Act, and en- 

1 Supra, 68. 
448 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

deavour as he did so to recall the figure, look and voice 
with which his father would have delivered them. Pitt 
did so, and admitted the probable effect of the speech 
thus delivered. But it is to be observed that he did not 
admit the accuracy. Almon, who knew something of 
this matter, says that none of the reports of Pitt's speeches 
before 1760 can be depended upon. In 1766 Almon began 
reporting the debates himself, and so would claim greater 
exactness, and may easily have attained it. 

One is in fact thrown back on the impressions and the 
descriptions of those who heard him. Horace Walpole, 
who at this time admired Pitt as much as he could admire 
anybody, gives us striking glimpses, some of which we have 
already quoted ; one of which, that of the answer to Hume 
Campbell, is exquisite in felicity of phrase. Chesterfield 
says that Pitt's 'eloquence was of every kind, and he 
excelled in the argumentative as well as in the declamatory 
way. But his invectives were terrible, and uttered with 
such energy of diction, and stern dignity of action and 
countenance that he intimidated those who were the most 
willing and the best able to encounter him. Their arms 
fell out of their hands, and they sank under the ascendant 
which his genius gained over theirs. ' In a note Chesterfield 
tells us that the last phrases allude to Murray and Hume 
Campbell. 'Mr. Pitt,' he says elsewhere, 'carried with 
him unpremeditated the strength of thunder and the splen- 
dour of lightning.' These extracts convey the impression 
made by Pitt on one of the acutest judges of the time, 
himself an orator of eminence, and no friend to his subject. 

Bishop Newton gladly avails himself of the same familiar 
metaphor: 'What was said of the famous orator Pericles, 
that he lightened, thundered, and confounded Greece, was 
in some measure applicable to him.' 'He had,' says the 
Bishop, 'extraordinary powers, quick conceptions, ready 

449 



LORD CHATHAM 

elocution, great command of language, a melodious voice, 
a piercing eye, a speaking countenance, and was as great an 
actor as an orator. During the time of his successful ad- 
ministration he had the most absolute and uncontrolled 
sway that perhaps any member ever had in the House of 
Commons. With all these excellences he was not without 
his defects. His language was sometimes too figurative 
and pompous, his speeches were seldom well connected, 
often desultory and rambling from one thing to another, 
so that though you were struck here and there with noble 
sentiments and happy expressions, yet you could not well 
remember nor give a clear account of the whole together. 
With affected modesty he was apt to be rather too confident 
and overbearing in debate, sometimes descended to personal 
invectives, and would first commend that he might after- 
wards more effectually abuse, would ever have the last 
word, and right or wrong still preserved (in his own phrase) 
an unembarrassed countenance. He spoke more to your 
passions than to your reason, more to those below the bar 
and above the throne than to the House itself; and, when 
that kind of audience was excluded, he sunk and lost much 
of his weight and authority.' 1 

Grattan's testimony, as that of a famous orator, cannot 
here be passed, though it refers to a later period. ' He was 
a man of great genius, great flight of mind. His imagina- 
tion was astonishing He was very great and very 

odd. He spoke in a style of conversation, not however 
what I expected. It was not a speech, for he never came 
with a prepared harangue. His style was not regular oratory, 
like Cicero or Demosthenes, but it was very fine and very 

elevated, and above the ordinary subjects of discourse 

His gesture was always graceful. He was an incomparable 
actor. Had it not been so he would have appeared ridicu- 

1 Works, i. 135. 
45° 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

lous His tones were remarkably pleasing. I recollect 

his pronouncing one word "effete" in a soft charming 

accent. His son could not have pronounced it better 

His manner was dramatic. In this it was said that he 
was too much the mountebank; but if so it was a great 
mountebank. Perhaps he was not so good a debater as 
his son, but he was a much better orator, a better scholar, 
and a far greater mind. Great subjects, great empires, 
great characters, effulgent ideas and classical illustrations 
formed the material of his speeches.' Grattan gives ex- 
amples, and even notes of one of his speeches, but they 
are all outside our period. 1 

These notes on Pitt's oratory cannot well be omitted, 
though they are almost too familiar to quote. But there 
is one, never yet published, which is written by an intimate 
but merciless critic. Lord Camelford was only nineteen 
at the time when our narrative terminates, but he must 
already and for some years afterwards have been steeped 
in his uncle's eloquence, so that his description is of peculiar 
interest. 

'In Parliament he never spoke but to the instant, re- 
gardless of whatever contradictions he might afterwards be 
reduced to, which he carried off with an effrontery without 
example. His eloquence was supported by every advan- 
tage that could unite in a perfect actor. Graceful in motion, 
his eye and countenance would have conveyed his feelings 
to the deaf. His voice was clear and melodious, and 
capable of every variety of inflection and modulation. His 
wit was elegant, his imagination inexhaustible, his sensi- 
bility exquisite, and his diction flowed like a torrent, impure 
often, but always varied and abundant. There was a style 
of conscious superiority, a tone, a gesture of manner, which 
was quite peculiar to him — everything shrunk before it; 

1 Life of Grattan, i. 234. 
451 



LORD CHATHAM 

and even facts, truth and argument were overawed and 
vanquished by it. On the other hand, his matter was never 
ranged, it had no method. He deviated into a thousand 
digressions, often reverted back to the same ground, and 
seemed sometimes like the lion to lash himself with his own 
tail to rouse his courage, which flashed in periods and sur- 
prised and astonished, rather than convinced by the steady 
light of reason. He was the very contrast of Lord Mans- 
field, his competitor in eloquence, who never appealed but 
to the conviction of the understanding, with an arrangement 
so precise that every sentence was only the preparation for 
the force that the next was to obtain, and scarce a word 
could be taken away without throwing the whole argument 
into disorder; the other bore his hearers away by rapid 
flights into a region that looked down upon argument, and 
opposed the transport of feeling to conviction.' 

This appears to be a description as accurate as it is 
vivid, and perhaps none gives the personality and manner 
of Pitt with more effect. The style of conscious superiority 
peculiar to him before which everything shrank; the way 
in which the orator worked himself into wrath, like a lion 
lashing himself with his own tail; the eye and countenance 
which would have conveyed his meaning to the deaf; these 
are touches which we feel to be accurate, and which seem to 
explain much of the effect of Pitt's oratory. Let us here 
note that Cradock gives a curious account of an oratorical 
failure of Pitt's in later life and of his consequent irritation, 
eminently comforting to humbler speakers. 1 

We value sketches like these much more than any 
professed reports of Pitt's speeches, which cannot be 
accurate reproductions. But, even if they were, they 
would, we are told, be but pale shadows of the reality, 
for so much depended on the soul and grace with which 

1 Cradock's Literary Memoirs, i. ioo-i. 
45 2 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

they were uttered; for the majesty of his presence, his 
manly figure, his exquisite voice, his consummate acting, 
his harmonious action, and. above all the lightning of his 
eyes inspired reluctant awe before he uttered a word. 
We can fancy him rising in the House, which subsides at 
once into silence and eager attention. On not a few faces 
there will be uneasiness and alarm; on the ministerial 
bench some agitation, for it is there probably that the 
thunderbolts may fall. His opening is solemn and im- 
pressive. Then he warms to his subject. He states his 
argument. He recalls matters of history and his own 
personal recollections. Then with an insinuating wave 
of his arm his voice changes and he is found to be drowning 
some hapless wight with ridicule. Then he seems to ramble 
a little, he is marking time and collecting himself for 
what is coming. Suddenly the rich notes swell into the 
fulness of a great organ, and the audience find them- 
selves borne into the heights of a sublime burst of eloquence. 
Then he sinks again into a whisper full of menace which 
carries some cruel sarcasm to some quivering heart. Then 
he is found playing about his subject, pelting snowballs 
as he proceeds. If the speech is proceeding to his satis- 
faction it will last an hour or perhaps two. Its length will 
perhaps not improve it but no one can stir. There may 
be ineffective, tedious, obscure passages, but no one knows 
what may be coming, these vapours often precede a glow- 
ing sunburst. So all through the speech men sit as though 
paralysed, though many are heated with wine. He will 
not finish without some lofty declamation which may be 
the culminating splendour of the effort. If any effective 
replies are made, he will reply again and again, heedless 
of order, vehement, truculent, perhaps intemperate. And 
as he sits down perhaps with little applause, the tension 
of nerves, almost agonising in its duration and concent ra- 
30 453 



LORD CHATHAM 

tion, snaps like a harpstring; the buzz of animated con- 
versation breaks forth with an ecstasy of relief. The 
audience disperses still under the spell. As it wears off, 
hostile critics begin to declare that it is all acting; the 
fellow acts better than Garrick. Garrick, indeed, himself 
declared that had Pitt originally preferred the stage of 
Drury Lane for that of St. Stephen's, he would almost 
have annihilated the stage by distancing all competition. 1 
He was, without doubt, an incomparable actor, for no less 
a power would have enabled him to engage in some of 
his most famous nights with effect, or without reaction 
or ridicule. His action, his inflections, his vehemence 
are no doubt at least as good as Garrick 's. But these are 
merely the accessories which to the shallow or cynical 
observer seem to be the heart or the whole of the matter. 
One might as well say that it is the varnish that makes 
the picture, or the goblet that makes the vintage. The 
orator is probably unconscious or at most half-conscious 
of what seems dramatic, he is moved by an irresistible 
blast of passion which carries him as well as his audience 
away. The passion may have been stirred beforehand, 
but at the moment of outpouring it is genuine enough. 
Pitt no doubt had trained himself to be graceful in anima- 
tion, had studied and enhanced the beauties of his voice, 
so that when excited his tones were a ways musical, and 
his action harmonious. He may in earlier days have 
rehearsed speeches in private, though he probably delivered 
something different when the time came. But to imagine 
that when he spoke he was acting a prepared speech is 
to ignore the main features of his oratory, the force coming 
from an internal impulse which was for the moment irre- 
sistible. It should be remembered too, that in one sense 
he was always acting in the common business of life; 

1 Foote's Table Talk, p. 103. 
454 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

when he chipped an egg, or talked to his gardener, or 
mounted his horse, he was acting. He might not, indeed, 
study his gesture at the moment, but that was because 
he had been studying gestures half his life. He had ap- 
propriated the dramatic way of doing things till it had 
become a second nature to him; thus, what would have 
been acting in others was natural to him. And indeed, 
he had so adjusted and prepared and schooled himself, 
that all his emotions were effectually concealed. The 
fierce character of the man would sometimes be irrepressible, 
but even then it would be vented with an awful grace. 
And so when he was said to be acting in the House he was 
natural, for acting had become a second nature to him. 
When this is so, acting has ceased to be acting. Mrs. 
Siddons would give her orders at dinner in the awful tones 
of Lady Macbeth. This was not acting but nature, trained 
but unconscious nature. So it was with Pitt. He would 
not laugh, because it was undignified to laugh. If he had 
a book or a play to read aloud and came to a comic part, 
he passed it to another to read and resumed the volume 
when the humorous part was over, lest, we may presume, 
he should smile or become incidentally ridiculous. His 
countenance was, so to speak, enamelled with such anxious 
care, that a heedless laugh might crack the elaborate 
demeanour. And so he lived in blank verse, and conducted 
himself in the heroic metre. We should surmise, though 
not with certainty, that some of his more famous flights, 
such as the comparison of the Rhone and the Saone, were 
prepared to some extent, but that there was nothing 
written. This is only guesswork, for of his method of 
preparation we know nothing. But his diction was habitu- 
ally perfect. To improve it he had twice read through 
Bailey's Dictionary, and had plodded through masses of 
sermons, particularly those of Barrow, Abernethy, and ' the 

455 



LORD CHATHAM 

late Mr. Mudge of Plymouth.' * ' Every word he makes use 
of,' said Chesterfield as early as 17 51, 'is the very best, 
and the most expressive that can be used in that place.' 
That was the result of constant and familiar effort. Like 
Bolingbroke he had trained himself to spare no pains in 
ordinary conversation to attain accuracy of expression, so 
as to be sure of himself in public. ' It would not be be- 
lieved how much trouble he took to compose the most 
trifling note.' He told Shelburne that a phrase he had 
used in one of his speeches could not be taken exception 
to, as he had tried it on paper three times before employing 
it in public. Assiduous study of words, constant exercise 
in choice language, so that it was habitual to him even 
in conversation, and could not be other than elegant even 
in unpremeditated speech, this combined with poetical 
imagination, passion, a mordant wit and great dramatic 
skill, would probably seem to be the secrets of Chatham's 
oratorical supremacy. And yet it is safe to predict that a 
clever fellow who had mastered all this would produce but 
a pale reflection of the original. It is not merely the 
thing that is said, but the man who says it which counts, 
the character which breathes through the sentences. 
Mirabeau would, as we know, take a manuscript speech 
produced by a laborious friend, in itself a dull thing, and 
read it from the tribune with such energy of inspiration 
that it would carry the Assembly by storm. This is the 
more marvellous when we remember that a man who reads 
the best possible speech with the most effective 'elocution 
is heavily handicapped. And so it may safely be assumed 
that imitation of Pitt would be doomed to disastrous fail- 
ure. The secret of oratory like this evades the most anxious 
student: its effect both on the immediate audience and on 
posterity seems beyond definition or adequate explanation. 

1 Seward's Anecdotes, ii. 357. 
456 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

Some orators impress their audience, some their readers, 
a very few posterity as well. The orators who impress their 
audience rarely impress their readers, and those who impress 
their readers are usually less successful with their audience. 
Few indeed are those who reach posterity or indeed survive 
a year. Pitt, if any one indeed can be said to have read his 
speeches, combined all three forms of supremacy. More 
than this, his utterances with a sort of wireless telegraphy 
seemed to thrill the nation which neither heard nor read 
them. In the century which followed Chatham's death 
there was an illustrious succession of orators and debaters. 
And yet none of these eminent men with all their accurately 
reported speeches have left so deep an impress of eloquence 
as the elder Pitt, who was not reported at all. We cannot 
doubt that it is better for his fame that he was unreported. 
Sheridan never did anything wiser than when, in his need, 
he refused the most splendid offers to revise his Begum 
speech for publication. Pitt's speeches would have lost 
half their force without the splendour of delivery. His 
unreported eloquence has become matter of faith, and 
so it is likely to remain. 

Mr. Lecky, from whom it is difficult to differ, thinks 
that his speeches were deficient in pathos and wit. As 
to this last, the testimony of his contemporaries is emphatic 
the other way, and they are loud in extolling Pitt's piercing 
wit. We have seen how Walpole and Murray concur 
in extolling his powers of ridicule. 'He can turn any- 
thing into ridicule,' Murray had said. 'He can tickle to 
death with a feather,' was Walpole 's description. Nor 
should we imagine he was defective in pathos; not perhaps 
in youth, for youth is not the season of pathos; but cer- 
tainly in later years. The speeches, for example, delivered 
in the garb of an invalid, abounded we should surmise in 
pathos, to which the costume was preliminary and acces- 

457 



LORD CHATHAM 

sory. But pathos, which has something of humility in its 
tenderness, was, it must be admitted, alien to the haughty 
superiority which Pitt asserted and assumed. 

One word more of fascinating conjecture. Would he 
have been a great popular orator at mass meetings and the 
like? We cannot imagine Pitt a platform speaker, yet we 
can scarcely imagine a better. His graceful appearance, 
his terrible eye, the winning and majestic modulations of 
his voice, his spontaneity, his magnetic power, his wealth 
of ridicule, his poignant personalities, his dramatic force, 
his variety and unexpectedness constituted the most for- 
midable equipment for platform oratory ever possessed by 
mortal man. And yet we cannot regret that he never was 
tried. 

Pitt's life marks itself out with singular distinctness' 
into definite periods. From 1708 to 1734 is the period of 
obscure youth, on which this volume should throw some 
light. From 1734 to 1745 is the period of reckless and 
irresponsible opposition, when he is trying the temper of 
his weapons. From 1745 to 1754 he remains in the shadow 
of subordinate office. From 1754 to 1756, though still 
partly in office, he emerges as an independent figure of 
extraordinary and irresistible force. From 1756 to 1761 
is the period of power, four years of which are unrivalled 
in the annals of Great Britain. From 1761 to 1770 is the 
period of detachment, or attempted detachment, from 
party. It includes some tenure of office, much obscurity 
and illness, some actual insanity. And from 1770 till his 
death in 1778 he appears sometimes to be attempting to 
make his peace with the party system, having found it im- 
practicable to stand alone ; sometimes he seems to be retir- 
ing once more into his cell. 

Few careers can be marked out so clearly; few have 
such a glamour. But the glamour and the glory are yet 

458 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

to come; they lie beyond this book. Already indeed there 
are confidence and hope, confidence in his vigour, his hon- 
esty, and his uprightness; but this is due rather to others 
than to himself. Every one else has failed, this may be the 
man of destiny. 

And yet up to this time the career of Pitt has been, 
eloquence apart, not unlike that of other ambitious and not 
very scrupulous politicians. He begins by attacking Sir 
Robert Walpole. Why? He has no particular objection 
to Sir Robert Walpole; in after years he acknowledges 
that he was a great statesman. It was partly a freak of 
youth. Who is the biggest man to attack, the man by 
combating whom one can acquire the most honour and 
reputation? Obviously Walpole. So tilt at him. He is 
asked to an important house; for the first time he finds 
himself in the great world. He is caressed, perhaps flat- 
tered; for he has a school renown, and is a lad to be 
secured. He is with his Eton friends, and they think all 
the world of Cobham, his wisdom, his courage, his magnifi- 
cence; they all in a measure depend on him. Thus he is 
allured into the charmed circle, and they form much the 
same group as that which was in our own days called the 
Fourth Party. 

So they enter the House of Commons in high spirits, 
and lay about them with reckless intrepidity. Pitt is soon 
marked out for martyrdom by the Minister. But in a short 
time he is conspicuous for other reasons. He towers from 
the waist above his comrades as a bitter, incisive speaker. 
Walpole begins to take notes of his speeches ; he is the com- 
ing man, and is at once secured for the faction of the Prince 
of Wales. Then Walpole falls. There is a great crash, 
and the spectators expect to see the world in ruins. But 
when the dust has cleared away it is seen that things are 
much as they were; Wilmington, scarcely visible, in Wal- 

459 



LORD CHATHAM 

pole's seat; Newcastle rooted in his own; Walpole, with 
Pulteney his protagonist, seated smug and dumb among^ 
the distant peers. There is no room for Pitt among our 
governors ; the only new figure that strikes one is Carteret, 
he is evidently the moving spirit of the piece. As the 
prominent minister, and as an object of hatred to Cobham, 
he is obviously the man for Pitt now to attack, and he 
trounces Carteret as recklessly as he . had Walpole ; only 
Walpole was able to reply, and Carteret cannot; for he 
sits where Walpole sits. Carteret, again, he mainly attacks 
for his eminence. He calls Carteret execrable now, but, 
when the battle is over, takes pride in declaring that to his 
patronage, to his friendship, to his instruction ' I owe what- 
ever I am.' Still, the business of party must be done, and 
so Carteret must be assailed. Then Carteret disappears, 
and Pitt is without a target. But the young man has to 
realise that in his reckless onslaughts he has incidentally 
but mortally wounded the honour of the King. Walpole 
and Carteret are off the scene; and the stage is now occu- 
pied, so far as he is concerned, by a monarch who is an 
incarnate veto as regards him, and who can never forgive 
him. This produces a new situation. Pitt is as strenuous 
to be pardoned as he was to offend ; he is all milk and honey 
in public, but apprises the Pelhams, who are now in sole 
possession of the administration, that he is not disposed 
to be long-suffering, and that the ordinary rewards of 
political warfare are overdue. They are fully alive to the 
situation and attempt to mollify the Sovereign. But their 
labour is in vain, and so, with more subtlety than patriot- 
ism, they produce a ministerial crisis when civil war is alive 
in the island. The King has to yield, and, in angry sub- 
mission, receive Pitt. The new placeman, having achieved 
office, subsides into a long silence. Pelham dies at last, 
and the great inheritance has to be divided. Pitt is ill and 

460 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

absent; his rival is at once preferred (though alienated); 
while Pelhanrs brother attempts to guide, with the help 
of the Master of the Great Wardrobe, what Pelham could 
not control. The result is easily foreseen. The rivals 
unite to tear the Master limb from limb, and one of them 
has to be bought off. That one is not Pitt. And now 
something, pique or patriotism or marriage, one cannot 
analyse it now, perhaps he could not have analysed it him- 
self, lifts him into new splendours of eloquence. His rival 
seems cowed by the harness without the confidence of 
office. Pitt stands alone, no one dare face him. Mean- 
while he receives new authority from disaster. In every 
region where Britain is interested calamity follows calam- 
ity. The country is roused to a passion of wrath and 
vengeance. It demands victims. Byng in prison remains 
an open wound to remind the nation of its miscar- 
riages. They are resolved to shoot him, at any rate; they 
would not be unwilling to hang others whom they hold re- 
sponsible for his miscarriage, who are perhaps corrupt 
and who are certainly incapable and untoward Ministers; 
failing that, they will at least get rid of them. They look 
round and see no one but Pitt. He has been persecuted, 
he has been ignored by these Ministers, and yet his elo- 
quence, commanding in itself, has the true note of energy 
and patriotism. He shall be tried; and they call for him 
with as much energy as the French once called for Necker, 
but with a truer instinct. 

Strangely enough, there is so far little vigour in Pitt 
except in his speeches. Half his life is spent in prostration 
and seclusion, under the martyrdom of gout. As we have 
seen, on the very brink of his ministry, he assured Fox 
that his health would not allow him to hold office. And, 
indeed, in the whole life of this singular man there is noth- 
ing more remarkable than this, that in the glimpses we 

461 



LORD CHATHAM 

obtain of himself, apart from great speeches and the result 
of victorious policy, we almost always find him prostrate 
with illness. It is generally the gout or its allies which dis- 
able him; but later it is disorder akin to if not identical 
with insanity. Not unnaturally, even among those less 
prone by profession to suspicion than the expert politician, 
his ill-health is often supposed to be an assumption or a 
screen. But in this calmer generation we can see that it was 
not, that the man never enjoyed health, as it is ordinarily 
understood, for a moment. He was always distempered, 
irritable, or hysterical, when not in pain. His public life 
was scarcely more than the intervals between fits of gout or 
nervous collapse. We are reminded of the sufferings of his 
son, as he approached the end of a long ministerial career, 
struggling against constant sickness and a wrecked consti- 
tution, when we contemplate the lifelong contest between 
the elder Pitt and hereditary disease. 

Heredity counts for much, for more than we reckon in 
these matters. We breed horses and cattle with careful 
study on that principle, the prize bull and the Derby winner 
are the result. With mankind we heed it little or not at all. 
With Pitt it was everything or almost everything. From 
his ancestors, most probably the Governor, who, we infer, 
was a free liver in a tropical climate, he derived the curse of 
gout. From the same progenitor he inherited a nervous, 
violent temperament, and some taint of madness. All this 
told partly for him, partly against him. The gout drove 
him to study and reflection, but it constantly disabled him. 
His temperament roused him to great heights of energy 
and passion both in eloquence and politics, but it also 
alienated his fellow-men, and made him sometimes eccen- 
tric, and somtimes turbulent. We cannot in such a matter 
hold the balance. What is genius? None can tell. But 
may it not be the result in character of the conflict of vio- 

462 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

lent strains of heredity, which clash like flint and steel, and 
produce the divine spark? 

This takes us beyond our limits, more especially those of 
time; for within those limits the genius of Pitt has only 
been displayed in the barren gift of eloquence. But when 
we consider his disabilities of heredity and of accident we 
deem him already heroic. Everything has been against 
him. He has contended against poverty and disease and 
contempt. He has been wounded in the house of his fam- 
ily. He has been constantly betrayed. He has had to 
suffer for long years in silence. He is forty-eight when he 
at last attains anything like power. From this point of 
view his career is pathetic. It seems such a waste of time 
and opportunity. But through these long impatient years 
he was being trained, hardened, one may almost say baked, 
in the furnace. In silence and bitterness the force was 
being accumulated that was to electrify the Empire. 

Still the dazzling result must not blind us to the facts as 
they stand at the moment when we are surveying and 
taking leave of them. Much in a man's life obviously de- 
pends on life: much too depends on death. 'Felix oppor- 
tunitate mortis' is a pregnant saying. How many village 
Hampdens, how many Miltons have passed away, inglorious 
because mute, and mute from premature death. Had 
Caesar or Marlborough died before middle age their military 
reputation would have been slender indeed. For how 
many men, on the other hand, has death come too late. 
What would have been the place in history of Napoleon 
III., had Orsini been a successful assassin? What that of 
Tiberius, had he died at sixty? The authors who have 
survived themselves are as the sands of the sea ; indeed the 
exceptions are those who have not. The politicians in the 
same case are less conspicuous, for they crumble into the 
House of Lords. Historians and rhetoricians have vied 

463 



LORD CHATHAM 

with each other in setting forth the glories of Pitt's supreme 
years. What we have to consider is his position in 1756, 
when we part from him in professed ignorance of what is 
to come. How would Pitt appear to us had he died when 
he was still forty-seven? He was forty-eight the day before 
Devonshire, in his name, assumed the government. That 
is a respectable age. The younger Pitt never reached it, 
though he had been Prime Minister for near a score of 
years. Napoleon closed his career at forty-six. It is need- 
less to detail examples. But at forty-seven the elder Pitt 
could only claim that he had been Paymaster of the Forces, 
and had cowed but not persuaded the House of Commons 
by his oratory. He had too the faith of the people, un- 
earned except by vague echoes of purity and eloquence. 
Otherwise his career had been much like other careers, de- 
nouncing, or coquetting and even pressing for office, equable 
in expectation, and vindictive if refused. Pride was his 
besetting sin; yet he had stooped, to conquer. 

All seems to depend on this point, so difficult to decide : 
was there patriotism in all this alloy? Was the anxiety 
for office the mere craving of the politician for reward, or 
was it the real consciousness of capacity, purity, and in- 
spiration? It may well in earlier days have been the more 
vulgar ambition, vulgar but not reprehensible; for office 
is the legitimate end and object of the public man; and Pitt 
had earned it a hundred times over by ordinary standards, 
while compelled to stand aside and see his inferiors pro- 
moted. But at the period which we have reached we think 
the nobler sentiment is unmistakable. He will not hold out 
a finger, he spurns all assistance, he builds without any 
foundation but himself. Had he wished only for the snug 
and secure possession of office he would have welcomed the 
co-operation of Newcastle and Fox, invaluable allies in their 
different ways. But at this time he will have none of them, 

464 



HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS 

he dreams of a government which free from taint or sus- 
picion shall appeal for the confidence of the country on the 
highest and purest grounds. 

Here we feel, and feel with relief, that we can give a 
clear verdict. The rest matters little. The path of the 
statesman rarely skirts the heights, it is rough, rugged, 
sometimes squalid, as are most of the roads of life. We 
are apt to make idols, to ignore shadows, and to fancy 
that we see stars; not too apt, for it is an illuminating 
worship. But, that being so, let not those who have to 
scrutinise therefore condemn. All careers have their blots. 
The best and happiest are those in which the blemishes 
are obscured by high achievement. That was supremely 
the case with Pitt. His upward ascent was much like other 
ascents, neither better nor worse. But when he reached 
the summit, and acted in full light and freedom, his triumph 
was so complete that none deem it worth while to scan his 
previous record. None should care now, were it not a 
healthy propensity to seek to know as much as possible 
of the lives of great men. It is preposterous to depict 
Pitt as an angel of light. But yet, judged by the standard 
of his day, the only proper standard to apply, and indeed 
by the standard of any day, he must be held even in his 
darkest hours not to have compromised his historical 

future. 

Whatever his failings may have been, his countrymen 
have refused, and rightly refused, to take heed of them. 
They have refused to see anything but the supreme orator, 
the triumphant minister of 17 57-1 761, the champion of 
liberty in later years at home and in the West. With 
Pitt, as with Nelson, his country will not count flaws. What 
do they matter? How are they visible in the sunlight 
of achievement? A country must cherish and guard its 
heroes. 

465 



LORD CHATHAM 

We have climbed with him in his path to power. We 
have seen him petulant, factious, hungry, bitter. And 
yet all the time we have felt that there was always some- 
thing in him different in quality from his fellow-politicians 
when they aired the same qualities, that there was an 
imprisoned spirit within him struggling for freedom and 
scope. At last it bursts its trammels, he tosses patronage 
and intrigue to the old political Shylocks, and inspires the 
policy of the world. Vanity of vanities! Twenty years 
after his epoch of glory, three years after his death, Britain 
has reached the lowest point in her history But still she 
is the richer for his life. He bequeaths a tradition, he 
bequeaths a son, and when men think of duty and achieve- 
ment they look to one or the other. It will be an ill day for 
their country when either is forgotten. 



INDEX 



Aberdeen, Lord, 134. 

Abernethy, Dr., sermons by, 455, 456. 

Achilles, 303. 

Addison, Joseph, 'Cato' referred to, 

142. 
'Additional MSS.' referred to, 196, 227, 

257, 262, 274, 278, 285, 287, 288, 302, 

306, 318, 320, 342, 347, 417, 420, 423, 

425, 426, 430, 440, 441. 
Aix - la - Chapelle, Peace of, 156, 361; 

Treaty of, 195 ; debate on Treaty of, 

253. 254- 
Aldborough Election, 285, 295, 302, 

303, 318. 
Allen, Ralph, 103, 276. 
Allworthy, Squire, see Fielding, Henry. 
Almon, John, 274, 449. 
Alsace, Austrian armies in, 192. 
Althorp, Lord, 20, 239. 
'Ambulator, The,' 280. 
Amelia, Princess, 256. 
America, smuggling invasion of, 153; 

hostilities in, 319, 340, 361, etc. 
Angel Inn, Oxford, Chatham at, 332. 
Anne, Empress of Russia, death of, 

185. 
Anne, Queen of England, 204. 
Anson, Lord, 311, 320. 
Anstruther, General, 300. 
Antwerp, French enter, 194. 
Argyll Buildings, Chatham's marriage 

at, 325. 
Argyll, Duke of, 312, 412. 
' Army, History of the British,' see For- 

tescue, J- W. 
Arundel, Mr., 400. 
Ashbourne, Lord, 323. 
Ashburnham Park, 278. 
Ashley, — , 239. 
'Assembly of Notables,' 436. 
Astrop Wells, Chatham's visit to, 277, 

3 X 9; 

Austria, House of, 260. 
Austrian Netherlands, French in pos- 
session of, 195. 



Austrians, War of the Succession, 185, 
367; defeated at Molwitz, 187; de- 
feated at Chotusitz, 189; victorious 
in Bohemia, 190, 193; in Flanders, 

193. *94- 
Aylesbury, dispute over the Assizes at, 

248-251, 264; purchase of manor of, 

251. 
' Aylesbury, History of,' see Gibbs. 
Ayscough, Dr., 49, 52, 53, 57, 60, 63, 

71, 266, 325. 

Bailey's ' Dictionary,' Pitt's study 

of, 455- 
Baldwin, Lord Chief Justice, 251. 
Ballantyne, Archibald, Life of Lord 

Carteret quoted, 135, 165. 
Baltimore, Lord, 164. 
Bampton, 77. 

Banquier, Alexandre, 42, 63. 
Barnard, Sir John, 136. 
Barre, Isaac, 245. 
Barrington, Viscount, 228, 331, 386, 

387. 389, 396, 405. 440. 
Barrow, sermons of, 455. 
Bath, 7, 27, 36, 52-54, 58, 60, 61, 89, 91, 

96, 97, 102-107, 214, 276, 285, 317, 

324- 

Bath, Earl of, see Pulteney, Sir Will- 
iam. 

Battle Abbey, 278. 

Bavaria, protests against the succession 
of Maria Theresa, 186; seized by 
General Khevenhuller, 189; taken by 
Frederick II., 192. 

Bavaria, Elector of, see Frederick II. 

Bave, Dr. Charles, 52, 56. 

Bays, Mr., 72. 

Beckford, Alderman William, 153, 391, 
401. 

Bedford, Duke of, 216, 217, 225-227, 
255. 257> 258, 273, 355, 376, 390, 400, 
434, 437> 439, 442. 

'Bedford Correspondence,' 142, 435, 

437-439- 



467 



LORD CHATHAM 



Bedlam, 8. 

Bellamy, a frame maker, 74. 

Belleisle, Marshal, 188, 190. 

Belson, Mr., 447. 

Ben thick, Lord George, 175. 

Bentley, Richard, Walpole's letter to, 

3*3- 

Bergen, 3. 

Berkeley of Stratton, Lord, 230. 

Berkshire, land purchased in, 5. 

Berlin, 186, 193; Treaty of, 189. 

Besancon, 42, 63, 64, 321. 

Best, Mr., 22. 

Bland, Dr., 26. 

Blandford, 5, 53. 

'Blandford,' a man-of-war, 366. 

Blandford, Vicar of, see Pitt, John. 

Blount, Martha, 72. 

Boconnoc, 3, 5, 13, 21, 22, 40, 50, 51, 
56; Chatham's early life at, 40; rea- 
sons for living at, 53, 54. 

Bohemia, Frederick II. proclaimed king 
in Prague, 188; taken by Frederick 
II., 192. 

Bolingbroke, Lady, 78, 79. 

Bolingbroke, Lord, 122, 133, 136, 137, 
162, 214; nicknamed the Pitts, 50; 
. called the ' intellectual Samson of 
Battersea,' 299; accuracy of expres- 
sion of, 456; his newspaper, the 
Craftsman, 151; 'Remarks on His- 
tory of England,' 299. 

Bolton, Duke of, 230. 

Boone, Mr., 252. 

Boscawen, Admiral, 364. 

Boswell, James, 276. 

Bourchier, Colonel, 41. 

Bourbons, extravagance of the, 180; 
union of the, 191. 

"Boy Patriots, The,' 120. 

Braddock, General, 363, 364. 

Breda, peace negotiations at, 195. 

Breslau, Peace of, 189, 190. 

Brest, 207. 

Bridport, Lord, 321. 

Bright, John, 239. 

Bristol, 96, 97. 

Broad Bottom Administration, 218, 219. 

Broglie, Marshal, 188. 

Bromley, 282. 

Brompton, Richard, portrait-painter, 

445- 
Browne, Lancelot, 121. 
Broxom, 72. 

Brussels, French enter, 194. 
Bubb, see Dodington, George Bubb. 
Buchan, Lord, 36, 37. 
Buckhurst, 277. 



Buckingham, the representation of, 
123 ; dispute over the Assizes at, 248- 
251, 263. 

Buckingham, Duke of, see Grenville, 
Richard Temple, Earl Temple. 

Burchett, Will., 26, 27. 

Burdett, — , 239. 

Burke, Edmund, 20, 123. 

Burleigh, Lord, 389. 

Burton-Pynsent, 114, 280. 

Bute, Earl of, 20, 79, 80, 107, 111, 
112, 115, 116, 127, 266, 270, 353, 374, 
402, 414, 418, 424, 440, 441. 

Bute, Lady, 116. 

Butler, 'the Reminiscent,' 328, 331, 
447. 448. 

Byng, Admiral, 410-412, 461. 

' Cabinets, History of,' see Torrens, 
W. T. McC. 

Cadogan, Charles, 2nd Baron, 412. 

Calcraft, John, letter to Digby, 328. 

Camden, Earl of, see Pratt, Sir Charles. 

Camelford, Lord, see Pitt, Thomas, 1st 
Baron Camelford. 

'Camelford MSS.' referred to, 78, 234, 
376, 446. 

Campbell, Hume, 392, 393, 394, 396, 
397. 400, 449. 

Canning, George, 147. 

Canons, Palace of, 235. 

Cardigan, Lady, 77. 

Cardross, Lord, 37. 

Carlisle, 142. 

Carlisle, Frederick Howard, 5th Earl 
of, 146, 147; 'Papers' referred to, 
147. 

Carlyle, Thomas, ' Frederick the Great ' 
referred to, 186, 367. 

Caroline, Princess, 141, 338. 

Caroline, Queen, 49, 182. 

Carteret, John, Earl Granville, 233, 
37?. 373. 397 ; statesmanship of, 133 ; 
ability and distinction of, 136, 164, 
165; negotiations of, 162, 163; Pitt's 
animosity to, 164, 172, 173, 175, 200, 
201, 256; Pitt's admiration of, in 
later years, 201, 202; his relations 
with George II., 180, 181; ability rec- 
ognised by George II., 223, 224; his 
knowledge of the classics, 165; as a 
linguist, 166 ; his contempt for money, 
166; Chesterfield's opinion of, 168; 
supports the Earl of Bath, 198; down- 
fall of, 210, 215-218; Administration 
against, 227; Secretary of State, 229; 
President of the Council, 273, 430; 
Walpole's distrust of, 286; on North 



468 



INDEX 



Carteret, John— Continued. 

American affairs, 319; on subsidies, 

347; Fox's enmity against, 351; 

Newcastle's negotiations with, 355; 

his forty-eight hours' Ministry, 373; 

Fox's resignation, 420-422; attacks 

of Pitt upon, 460; 'Life of Carteret, 

see Ballantyne, A. 
Chaillot, 91. 
Chambers, 129. 
Chandos,Dukeof,i29; Dukedom of,23S. 

Charleroi, taken by the French, 194. 

Charles II., 359. 3 86 - 

Charles III., 189. 

Charles VI., 185-187. 

Charles VII., 192. 

Charles Edward, 'the Young Pretend- 
er,' see Stuart. 

Chatham, Lady, see Grenville, Lady 
Hester. 
Chatham MSS.' referred to, 46, 47. 8 4, 

91, 232, 414- _ < r 

Chatham, William Pitt, 1st Earl of, 
parentage, 1, 7, 10, 11; birth, 24; 
death, 116, 284; appearance and 
characteristics, 384, 444-446; at 
Eton, 25; at Oxford, 28, 29; father, 
8, 11, 13-15, 36; mother, 11, 13, 
24> 36-43; Governor Pitt's regard 
for, 10, 11, 24; sisters, 44-1 18; quar- 
rels with his sister Ann, 48, 49. 7 6 , 
77, 78-81, 105-107, 234; family 
quarrels, 17, 18, 20, 21, 45. 4°, 7 6 > 
77, 463; affected by gout, 25, 27, 28, 
36, 43, 88, 90, 107, 214, 271, 276, 
277, 285, 287, 288, 289, 302, 440, 442, 
462; military service, 4°~43, 5 6- 5 8 > 
120, 122, 145, 146, 148, 151; marries 
Lady Hester Grenville, 89, 90, 93, 
232, 321, 325; letters to Hester Gren- 
ville described, 323; lives and dies 
at Hayes, 95, 101, 284, 414; birth of 
children, 102, 415; legacy of Duchess 
of Marlborough to, 213, 214; anec- 
dotes of, 280, 281, 331; recommends 
Bolingbroke's works, 299; 'History 
of Chatham,' see Thackeray, Francis. 
Correspondence — with his father, 
27, 31, 3 2 ', to his mother, 36-43; 
sister Ann, 51-77, 81-86, 93, 95~ io 3^ 
sister Mary, 88; Duke of Newcastle, 
89, 299-302, 3°5-3°6; Sir George 
Lyttelton and Grenville, 288-290; 
Chancellor Hardwicke, 295, 296, 
307. 

Appointments — Groom of the Bed- 
chamber, 149, 220; Paymaster, 78, 
123, 232, 432, 464; Privy Seal, 115- 

31 



Chatham, William Pitt— Continued 
Secretary of State, 94, 437! Vlce " 
Treasurer of Ireland, 232, 238, 242. 
Parliamentary Career— Begins at 
Stowe, 71; represents Old Sarum, 
119 247, 285; elected for Seaford, 
247'; chosen for Aldborough, 303, 3 18, 
442; represents Okehampton, 442; 
his first session in Parliament, 132, 
145; George II.'s regard for, 99, 
145, 180, 181, 223, 224, 227, 228, 
.231, 240, 311, 3 l8 » 344, 424, 435, 
441?, 460; his regard for the King, 
221; Order of the Garter for Tem- 
ple, '128; member of the ' Junto ,'216; 
forcing his hand, 226; wields power 
through the people, 236, 433; views 
and plans on political situation, 288, 
292; apologies from Duke of New- 
castle, 305, 317; exclusion from Gov- 
ernment, 308, 379; American War, 
no; his finest speeches, 267, 327; 
strong remarks on Sir Thomas Robin- 
son, 329; distrust of and attitude to 
Fox, 320, 333, 337, 338, .432, 433. 
43c; Parliamentary intrigue, 337, 
338; as Leader of the House, 343, 
344; eulogises Legge for a position 
345; pecuniary awards to, 374; and 
Newcastle Ministry, 365-370, 429'. 
negotiations with Hardwicke, 426, 
427; co-operation sought with, 433; 
fails to form Ministry, 439-442 ; con- 
nection with Leicester House , 3 2 1 , 3 5 3- 
354, 369, 4i4, 433..43S, 44? \ J£f ora- 
tory, 448-458 ; periods of his lite, 457- 
458; effect of his life's mission, 466. 
Speeches, extracts of— On royal 
marriage, 145; reduction of army, 
151; convention with Spain, 154; de- 
nounces Walpole's administration, 
169, 170, 460; subsidies for foreign 
powers, 192, 217, 346-367, 396;trans- 
fer of Hanoverians, 220, 2 2i,_ 374; 
Bucks Assizes, 250; compensation of 
Glasgow, 252; peace of Aix-la- 
Chapelle, 254, 379", opposes^ navy 
reduction, 263, 264, 382; opinion on 
Regency Bill, 266, 267; Jewish 
Naturalisation Act, 271, 272; relief 
of Chelsea pensioners, 325; on elec- 
tion petitions, 327; tenure of shenff- 
deputyships, 358, 359; against New- 
castle Ministry, 369; seamen s prize 
money, 385; army estimates, 387; 
Militia Bill, 391, 427; reprimands 
Hume Campbell, 392-395; iar&go- 
treaties, 395-399; attacks Budget, 

469 



LORD CHATHAM 



Chatham, William Pitt — Continued. 
401, 407; on Swiss auxiliaries, 402; 
criticism on army grant, 406. 

Chesterfield, Philip Dormer Stanhope, 
Earl of, and Ann Pitt, 50; states- 
manship of, 133; his ability and dis- 
tinction, 136 ; his opinion of Pulteney, 
162; quotations from his Letters, 
168; character of George II., 182; 
opposed to the Hanoverian vote, 206 ; 
bequest to by the Duchess Marl- 
borough, 213; member of Opposi- 
tion Committee, 216; Lord-Lieuten- 
ant of Ireland, 219; letter from New- 
castle, 226, 227; resignation of, as 
Secretary of State, 255; eulogises 
Pitt and Murray, 275; on the recon- 
struction of the Ministry, 356; on 
the character of Pitt, 446, 447, 449; 
on Pitt's study of words, 456. 

Chevening, residence of Stanhope, 3, 
116, 280. 

Chippenham Election, 159. 

Cholmondeley, Lord, Vice-Treasurer of 
Ireland, 232, 400. 

Cholmondeley, Mrs., death of, 89. 

Cholmondeley, Charles, 13. 

Chotusitz, Battle of, 189. 

Clement XII., Pope, death of, 185. 

Climenson's 'Mrs. Montague' referred 
to, 276, 277, 282. 

Clive, Lord, 361. 

Cobbett, William, 123; ' Parliamentary 
History' referred to, 152, 154, 155, 
169, 171, 172, 173, 200, 201, 202, 206, 
220, 222, 247, 251—254, 260, 262, 443. 

Cobden, Richard, 239. 

'Cobham's Cubs,' 120. 

Cobham, Lord, see Temple, Sir Rich- 
ard, afterwards Lord Cobham. 

Cobham Party (The), 199. 

Colchester, Petition for, 328. 

Colebrooke, Lord, 315. 

Colebrooke's 'Memoirs,' 270, 315. 

Cologne, Elector of, 261. 

Compiegne, Council at, 365. 

Congreve, William, 122. 

Conway, a cousin of Walpole's, 148, 

264, 437- 
Corbett, Mr., marriage of, 44. 
Corbett, Sir William, 44. 
Cornbury, Lord, 77. 
Cornwall, 5, 15, 40, 53, 56. 
Cornwall, Duchy of, 16. 
Cornwall, Duke of, 16. 
Cotton, Sir John Hinde, 205, 216, 217. 
'Cousins, The,' 120. 
Coxe, William, ' Memoirs of Henry Pel- 



Coxe, William — Continued. 

ham ' quoted, 227, 228, 254, 258, 261 ; 
'Memoirs of Sir Robert Walpole' 
quoted, 153, 155, 159, 337. 

Cradock, Joseph, 'Literary Memoirs' 
referred to, 452. 

' Cranford,' see Gaskell, Mrs. 

Cresset, Mr., 79, 105, 106. 

Cricket, played at Stowe, 73. 

Crowhurst, Colonel Pelham's place at, 
278. 

Culloden, Battle of, 246, 363. 

Cumberland, Duke of, Grenville's ha- 
tred of, 20; attempts to form a Pitt 
Ministry, 128; George II. 's affection 
f° r > 353; defeated at Fontenoy, 193; 
and at Lauffeld, 195; projected mar- 
riage of, 2 10; awarded a pension, 246 ; 
objections to, as Regent, 267 ; a mem- 
ber of the Regency Council, 338; his 
devotion to Fox, 268, 320, 333, 347, 
351, 354; alliance of Newcastle with, 
355 ; plan of campaign, 363 ; in disas- 
trous Ministry, 378 ; influence of, 432. 

Darcy, Sir Conyers, 400. 
Dashwood, Francis, Baron, 378. 
Delamere, Lord, 13. 
Delaval, John, speech at Berwick, 327. 
Delany, 'Memoirs of,' referred to, 47, 

115, 116. 
Denbigh, Lord, 228. 
Derby, Prince Charles Edward marches 

on, 223. 
Dettingen, Battle of, 196, 200; George 

II. at, 177-179; Pitt's view of the, 203. 
Devonshire, land purchased in, 5. 
Devonshire, Duke of, 309, 346, 347, 

421, 434-442. 
Devonshire House, assembly at, 436. 
De Witt, Jan, 403. 

Diamond, transaction of the Pitt, 3, 4. 
Diana, claims of city dedicated to, 65, 66. 
Dickens and Stanton, ' An Eighteenth 

Century Correspondence ' referred to, 

124. 
Digby, Lord, 328, 418, 420. 
Disraeli, Benjamin, 158, 159. 
'Divinity Pitt,' 50. 
Dodington, George Bubb, 124, 129, 

143, 205, 216, 217, 266, 315, 318, 319, 

337. 34i, 347, 35 -352, 404, 418, 436, 

437- 439- , , 

Dorsetshire, lands purchased in, 5. 
Dover, Lord, 143. 
Drax, Lord, 266. 
Dresden, occupied by Frederick II., 

193 ; Peace of, 225. 



470 



INDEX 



' Dropmore Papers ' quoted and referred 

to, 7, 12, 13, 24, 51. 
Duffell, Dr., 116. 
Dundonald, Lord, 'Autobiography of,' 

referred to, 123. 
Dunkirk, 253. 
Dupleix, 361. 
Dupplin, one of the Paymasters, 414, 

43°- 

Duquesne, Fort, 363. 

Dutch Expedition up the Thames re- 
called, 207. 

Dutens, Louis, reception by the Pitts, 
46, 47; 'Voyage' referred to, 161. 

East India Company, 2. 

Education, Chatham's letters on, 18. 

Edward III., 165. 

Egmont, Earl of, 253, 259, 266, 341, 
370, 430. 

' Eighteenth Century Correspondence,' 
see Dickins and Stanton. 

Election expenses, 132. 

Elizabeth, Empress of Russia, 189, 190, 
365, 367. 

Elizabeth, Queen of England, 386. 

Ellis, Welbore, 374, 379, 419, 420. 

Enfield Chase, 280. 

England, indifference of George II. and 
William III. to, 182, 183; pledged to 
the Pragmatic Sanction, 187; 'Re- 
marks on the History of,' see Bol- 
ingbroke, Lord. 

Epsom, 142. 

Eridge, 278. 

Erskine, Sir Henry, 36, 402, 425. 

Erskine, Thomas, 36. 

Esmond, Will, 12. 

Essex, Lady, see Pitt, Essex. 

Esther, name given to Chatham's wife, 
325. 

Eton, 10, 11, 25-28, 147. 

Eugene, Prince, 399. 

Excise scheme, 262. 

Fairly Farm, 278. 

Falmouth, Lord, 16. 

Fane, Lord, 328. 

Feilding, Charles, amiability of, 56, 67. 

Fielding, Henry, on Lord Chatham, 2 5 ; 

'Squire Airworthy' referred to, 103, 

276; 'Tom Jones' referred to, 25. 
Finch, Edward, 230. 
Finch, William, 230. 
Fitzgerald, Hon. Edward Villiers, 24. 
Fitzmaurice, Lord, ' Life of Shelburne ' 

referred to, 25, 43, 45, 153, 159, 162, 

426, 456. ■ 



Flanders, British troops in, 173, 189; 
military operations in, 193, 204, 205. 

Florence, 45. 

Fontainebleau, Treaty of, objects of 
the, 191. 

Fontenoy, battle of , 193, 196, 222, 225. 

Foote, Samuel, 161, 272; 'Table Talk' 
referred to, 454. 

Fort St. George, 3, 9. 

Fortescue Family, nickname of the, 53. 

Fortescue, J.W., ' History of the British 
Army,' quoted, 202. 

Fox, Charles, illness of, 310. 

Fox, Henry, at Eton with Chatham, 25 ; 
temperament, 211, 268-271; sketch 
of his character, 268-271; regarded 
as odious, 298; peerage endowment 
from Paymastership, 235, 269-270, 
286; candidate for Secretaryship' of 
State, 255, 257; the Buckingham 
Assize dispute, 249; the Marriage 
Act, 277; admitted to the Cabinet, 
335, 336, 337 ; member of the Council 
of Regency, 335, 338; Newcastle's 
choice between Fox and Pitt, 354; 
stipulations for promotions of friends, 
356; position on Provisioning Bill, 
360; as leader of the House, 301, 305, 
367, 374, 378, 380-383; opposes Bill 
for war prizes, 385; his challenge ac- 
cepted, 385; vetoes an appointment, 
392; defends Hume Campbell, 396; 
no voice in Treasury appointment, 
400; questions of dictatorship, 405; 
parliamentary intrigues and posi- 
tion, 417-425; mistakes concerning 
— resume of parliamentary life, 431- 
440; on Ann Pitt, 45, 46; prospects 
of the Young Pretender, 223 ; George 
II. 's inclination to, 290, 311; gratified 
with Chatham, 199; opposed to 
Chatham, 245, 266, 267, 268, 318, 

319. 333> 372, 379-383» 392, 393. 397. 
401, 405; visits Chatham, 397; 
placed over Chatham, 301; agree- 
ment with Chatham, 320; descrip- 
tion of Chatham's outburst with 
Newcastle, 326; meets Chatham at 
Holland House, 337; sends apologies 
to Hardwicke, 310; hatred of New- 
castle, 341, 355; and Newcastle's dis- 
grace, 412, 413, 429, 430; rivalries re- 
ferred to, 2 58 ; his enemies, 351; met- 
aphors used by, 372; letters quoted, 
312,313, 328, 332; Walpoleon, 402. 

' France, Histoire de, ' see Martin. 

France, Wars of, 187-192, 194, 195, 
207, 213, 361, etc. 



471 



LORD CHATHAM 



Franche-Comte, 63. 

Francis, Duke, 66. 

Frankfort, 191, 192. 

Frederick II. (the Great), accession of, 
185; in Silesia, 186; proclaimed Em- 
peror at Frankfort, 188; his claim of 
Silesia, 361; War of Austrian Suc- 
cession, 189, 192, 365-367; subsidy 
to, 261-263. 

' Frederick II. and his Times,' see 
Raumer. 

' Frederick the Great,' see Carlyle, 
Thomas. 

Frederick, Prince of Wales, heir ap- 
parent, 137-139; marriage of, 139, 
145; his character and conduct, 137- 
139; banished from Court, 140; ex- 
pelled from St. James's, 149; Dr. 
Ayscough adviser to, 49; father of 
George II., 180; friendship with 
Thomas Pitt, 16; at the General 
Election, 157; Carteret a favourite 
of, 166, 200, 201, 216; congratulates 
Walpole, 209; quarrels with Pitt, 
234; negotiations with Pitt, 265, 267; 
decline of affection for Lady Hamil- 
ton, 321; overtures to Fox, 333 ; death 
of, 238, 266. 

Frederick William, of Prussia, death 
of, 185. 

Free Trade, 212. 

Gage, Mr., M.P., 247. 

Gainsborough, Thomas, portrait by, 
321, 322. 

Gambier, Lord, 'Memorials,' 278. 

Warrick, David, 454. 

Gaskell, Mrs., ' Cranford ' referred to, 
320. 

Gay, John, 49. 

'Gazetteer, The,' newspaper, 151. 

'Gentleman's Magazine, The,' 173. 

George I., 144, i5°> l8 4, 353- 

George II., his dual personality, 177, 
188, 190; character of, 177; his polit- 
ical character, 178; Lord Hervey's 
unworthy portrayal of, 181; his 
courage, 202; with Lady Yarmouth 
at Richmond, 178; devotion for Han- 
over, 180, 182, 406; as Elector of 
Hanover concludes a treaty with the 
French, 187; on the security of the 
Electorate of Hanover, 260; placed 
under arrest by his father, 138; his 
hatred of his son the Prince of 
Wales, 150, 353; the Dutch War, 195; 
in Hanover, 364, 367; at Dettin- 
gen, 191; at Oudenarde, 179; signs 



George II. — Continued. 

the Treaty of Worms, 191; the 
Treaty of Berlin, 189; speech in 
Parliament, 1755, 368; gives Pre- 
miership to Pelham, 198, 199; his 
aversion to the Earl of Bath, 199; 
his anger with Newcastle, 418; dis- 
missal of Carteret, 209, 210, 217; 
Pitt's first visit to, 57; his hatred 
of Pitt, 99, 145, 164, 175, 176, 231, 
438, 439; reason for this hatred, 145 ; 
Pitt's apparent loyalty to, 387, 388; 
Pitt's desire for reconciliation with, 
418, etc., 424-430; testifies to Wal- 
pole's bravery, 135; discourteous 
treatment of Temple, 441 ; repug- 
nance to Legge, 438 ; the execution of 
Admiral Byng, 411. 

George III., as a lad, 266; compared 
with George II., 184; in the Lords, 
392; and Mr. Fox, 311, 333, 335, 418, 
43 1 ; endeavours to form a Pitt 
Ministry, 128, 129; Newcastle re- 
fuses a pension offered by, 160; on 
Pelham's death, 285; treaties with 
Hesse-Cassel and Russia, 339. 

' George III., Memoirs of the Reign of,' 
see Walpole, Horace. 

George IV., extravagance of, 180; 
compared with George II., 184. 

Georgia, 154, 191. 

Germaine, Lady Betty, 98. 

Germany, 100, 152, 178, 179, 189, 190. 

Gibbon, Edward, 43. 

Gibbs' ' History of Aylesbury ' referred 
to, 252. 

Gibraltar, proposed restoration to 
Spain, 191, 192. 

Gladstone, Rt. Hon. W. E., 211. 

Glasgow and the Jacobite occupation, 
252. 

Glatz, ceded to Frederick II., 189, 190, 
193. 

Glenfinnan,the Young Pretender at, 2 2 2 . 

Glover, Richard, 162, 163, 216, 217, 

237. 3i5- 
Gordon, Rev., 448. 
Gower, Granville Leveson, 216, 217, 

226, 227. 
Grafton, Duke of, 241. 
Grandison, Catherine, Viscountess of , 24. 
Grandison, Lord, 11, 14, 38, 42. 
Granville, Earl, see Carteret, John. 
'Grattan, Life of, 'referred to, 78, 79,451. 
Gray, Sir James, 64. 
Gray, Thomas, lampoon on Fox, 270. 
Grenville, Family of, Pitt united to the, 

16, 119-121, 355. 



472 



INDEX 



' Grenville Papers' referred to, 79, 121, 
123, 214, 253, 288, 291, 292, 298, 303, 
424, 439- 
Grenville, George, opposed the war in 
Flanders, 205; the Buckingham 
Assizes, 249; speech on unrest with 
Spain, 120; offices held by: — Prime 
Minister, 120; Lord of the Treasury, 
219, 442; Chancellor of the Ex- 
chequer, 316; Paymastership, 425; 
Secretaryship of State offered to, 
127; congratulated by Pitt, 317; Bill 
re vessels captured before declara- 
tion of war, 386; position and rea- 
sons for his hatred of Pitt, 20, 121; 
opposition to Pitt, 245 ; letters from 
Pitt to, 130, 238, 253, 415; letters 
from Lyttelton to, 289, 298; visit to 
Bath, 317. 
Grenville, Henry, 122. 
Grenville, James, 122, 123, 283, 340, 

425-. 
Grenville, Lady, inherits Boconnoc, 

22. 
Grenville, Lady Hester, 374, 375; wife 
of Chatham, 49, 93, 321, 322, 325; 
' letters of, and reference to, 91-93, 
97, 101, 103-105, 113-115, 283, 284; 
her character, 323; pension to, 113, 
114. 
Grenville, Richard Temple, afterwards 
Earl Temple, 75 ; resigned Privy Seal, 
128; proposed as Lord-Lieutenant of 
Ireland, 425; proposed as First Lord 
of the Admiralty, 436; refused to be 
First Lord of the Treasury, 125, 126, 
128; Order of the Garter, 128; his 
ambition a Dukedom, 129; applica- 
tion for title, 127; his bet, 127; 
apologises to Hervey, 127; cold re- 
ception at Court, 441; visits Chat- 
ham at Bath, 317; voted against the 
Hanoverians, 232; pensioned, 374; 
the Buckingham Assizes dispute, 
248, 264; Letters to, 291-292, 297- 
298, 302 ; ' Letters of Junius ' ascribed 
to, 126. 
Grenville, Thomas, killed in action off 

Cape Finisterre, 122. 
Grenvilles, the, 119, 120, 126; public 
money drawn by, 123, 124; friends 
of Pitt, 448 ; summoned by Pitt, 424 

Grub Street, 272. 
Guernsey, 74. 

Hagley, Lord Lyttelton's seat at, 279, 
285. 



Hague, Embassy to the, 219. 
Halifax, Earl of, 430. 
Hamilton, Duke of, 5, 6, 356, 369, 434. 
Hamilton, Lady Archibald, 321. 
Hamilton, Lord Archibald, 164. 
Hampden, Lord, attack on Pitt, 245, 

264. 
Hampden, Richard, estate of, 213. 
Hampshire, land purchased in, 5. 
Hampton Court, 77, 139, 183. 
Hannan, John, 47. 
Hannan, Sir William, 47. 
Hannibal, 175, 399. 
Hanover, Pitt's contempt for, 164, 171; 
George II. 's devotion to, 173, 174, 
180, 182; his visit to, 179; his ideas 
for safeguarding, 260; Convention 
signed at, between Britain and 
Prussia, 193; George III.'s visit to, 
339. 
Hanoverian Guards substituted for 

English Guards, 200. 
Hanoverians, allies of Britain, 194; 
English hatred of the, 199, 200; vote 
for maintenance of the, 206; trans- 
ferred to Maria Theresa, 220, 221. 
Hapsburg, House of, 187. 
Hardwicke, Philip Yorke, Earl of, let- 
ters to, 237, 295, 296, 303, 307, 319, 
320, 417; letters from, 320, 347, 348; 
on the alienation of the Prince of 
Wales from his parents, 144; as 
Newcastle's mentor and counsellor, 
161, 162, 286; on Pitt's popularity 
in the Commons, 170, 171; on Pitt's 
acrimoniousness, 201; and George 
II., 217, 218; on the foreign military 
policy, 224, 225; his treatment of 
Newcastle, 255; supports Newcastle, 
310; supports Pitt, 339-341; an- 
tagonism over Marriage Act, 277; 
as the brains of the Cabinet, 286; 
political unrest and intrigue of 1755- 
^S 6 . 352-356, 412, 413. 423-424. 
424-43 1. 433; 'Life of Hardwicke,' 
see Harris, George. 
Harrington, Earl of, 219, 225, 229. 
Harris, George, ' Life of Hardwicke ' re- 
ferred to, 140, 423, 429. 
Harrison, Mr., 68, 69. 
Hartington, Lord, 264, 310, 313; letters 

from Fox to, 328, 332. 
Hastings, 279. 
Hawke, Lord, 161. 
Hawkins, — , 356. 
Hay, Dr., 425. 

Hayes, 95, 101, 102, 104, 115, 279, 283. 
Hedges, William, quotations from, 2. 



473 



LORD CHATHAM 



Hell-fire Club, 251. 

Henley, Robert, 143. 

Herrenhausen, 183. 

Hertford, Lord, 129. 

Hervey, Lord, 127, 128, 141, 148, 149, 

151, 181,377; ' Memoirs ' referred to, 

141, 149, 151. 
Hesse, Landgrave of , 192. 
Hesse-Cassel, Treaty with, 339, 342, 

346. 
Hessians, allies of Britain, 194. 
Hillsborough, Lord, 337, 400. 
Hoare, William, portrait of Pelham, 

286; portraits of Pitt, 444, 445. 
Hochkirch, Battle of, 97, 98. 
Holdernesse, Lady, 105-107. 
Holdernesse, Lord, 258, 273, 363, 374, 

375, 436, 439, 440. 
Holland, 38, 183; the Dutch as allies, 

194; guarantee of assistance to, 224, 

225. 
Holland, Lady, 'Journal' quoted, 22. 
Holland House, meeting of Chatham 

and Fox at, 337. 
' Holland House MSS.' referred to, 270, 

310, 312, 319, 374, 393, 414, 418, 419, 

433, 434, 435, 43^, 437-44°, 442- 
Hollins, —,58. 
Holyrood, Prince Charles Edward at, 

222, 223. 
' Homer, Original Genius of,' see Wood, 

Robert. 
Hood, Admiral, 321. 
Houghton, Walpole at, 135, 209; his 

burial at, 210. 
Howard, Frederick, see Carlisle, Earl 

of. 
Howe, Captain Lord, 364. 
Hungary, Queen of, 186; subsidy voted 

to, 189. 
Hurstmonceux, 278. 
Hyde, Lord, 422. 

Impiger, 303. 

India, Governor Pitt's progress in, 2, 3. 

Innes Family, 7. 

Iracundus, 303. 

Irwin, Lady, 146, 147. 

Italy, war in, 196. 

Jacobitism, Governor Pitt on, 10. 
Jamaica, position of the Governorship 

of, 5- 
James I., 394. 
James II., 222, 252, 359. 
Jenkins's Ear, story of, 153. 
Jews' Naturalisation Act, 271, 272. 
Johnson, Dr., 235, 377, 448. 



Kaunitz, adviser of Maria Theresa, 
365. 

Kensington, 75, 76, 104-106, 108, 183. 

Khevenhuller, General, occupies Mu- 
nich, 189. 

Kielmansegge's 'Diary' quoted, 276. 

Kildare, Lord, 418. 

'Kildare, Narrative to, 'quotations from, 

433, 435, 436, 438- 
King, Mr., 278. 

Land's End, 207. 

Lanoe, Colonel, 53, 56. 

Lauffeld, Battle of, 195, 196. 

Leadam, quoted, 192. 

Leasowes, Shenstone's house at, 279. 

Lecky, W. E. H., 457. 

Lee, Dr., 143, 233, 245, 249, 251, 341. 

Legge, Henry Bilson, 301, 306, 347- 
349; letter to Chatham, 280, 281; 
Chancellor of the Exchequer, 315, 
318, 370, 374, 375, 425, 437, 438; a 
Lord of the Treasury, 442 ; Pitt s 
Ministry, 439; the King's repug- 
nance to, 438; proposed Peerage for, 
436; on Chatham's speech, 328; re- 
fused to sign the Hesse-Cassel Treaty, 
342 ; distrusted by Newcastle, 342 ; 
in praise of Walpole, 386. 

Leicester House, 105, 142, 266-268, 
290, 321, 336, 338, 339, 350, 353-354, 
369, 416, 433, 438, 440-441. 

Lifeguards escort George II., 178. 

Ligonier, General, 195. 

Limerick, Lord, 170, 172. 

Lincoln, acts as mediator between the 
Pelham brothers, 265. 

Linz, Archduke proclaimed in, 188. 

Liverpool, Lord, 130. 

'London Magazine, The,' 173. 

Londonderry, Lord, 1, 5, 6. 

Loo, 183. 

Lothian, Lord, 400. 

Loudoun, Lord, 402. 

Louis XIV., 123, 177, 178. 

Louis XV., 178, 191, 192, 195, 365; 
' Louis XV. et la Renversement des 
Alliances,' see Waddington, Richard. 

Louis XVIII., 130. 

Louisbourg, 104, 222. 

Low Countries, 173. 

Luneville, 42, 65, 66. 

Lyndhurst, Lord, 404. 

Lyte, Sir Henry, ' Dunster ' quoted, 6 ; 
' History of Eton' referred to, 27. 

Lyttelton, Christian, marriage with 
Thomas Pitt, 15, 38, 120; her char- 
acter, 16. 



474 



INDEX 



Lyttelton, Sir George, afterwards 
Baron Lyttelton, Pitt correspond- 
ence referring to, 26, 38-40, 44, 49, 

53. 5 8 > 7° - 7 2 » 288 > 28 9» 2 93 -2 95> 
299, 300, 302, 317; his companions 
in youth, 130; friendship with Will- 
iam Pitt, 119, 120, 448; supports 
Pitt, 264; quarrel with Pitt, 371; 
reconciliation, 378; private secretary 
to Prince of Wales, 149; re return to 
Parliament, 147; and standing army, 
151, 152; and Spanish War, 154, 155; 
influence over Pulteney, 163; secret 
terms with Walpole, 163 ; policy con- 
cerning war in Flanders, 204, 205; 
a Lord of the Treasury, 216-219; 
arranged coalition between forces of 
Stowe and Leicester House, 266; 
Cofferer, 316. 317; attempts recon- 
ciliation between Newcastle and 
Bedford, 376; Chancellor of the Ex- 
chequer, 376; his Budget, 401; War 
supplies, 406-408; Joint-Paymaster 
of the Forces, 414; character, 378; 
couplet, 146; works, 376, 377; 'Me- 
moirs and Correspondence of,' see 
Phillimore, R. J. 

Lyttelton, Molly, 68, 321, 353. 

Lyttelton, Sir Richard, 102, 120, 297, 

3 86 > 4 2 5. 43°- 
Lyttelton, Sir Thomas, 15. 
Lyttelton, William, 279. 

Macaulay, T. B., 29, 197. 

Macclesfield, Lord, death of, 123. 

Madras, 10. 

Maestricht, siege of, 254. 

Magyars appealed to by Maria Theresa, 
188. 

Mahon, Lady, 116. 

Maillebois, Marshal, 187. 

Mainz, Elector of, 261. 

' Malta, Knights of,' see Porter. 

Mann, Sir Horace, ' Letters to Hor- 
ace Walpole,' 46, 116, 128, 214, 
231. 

Mansfield, Lord, see Murray, William, 
Earl of. 

Marchmont, Earl of, Duchess of Marl- 
borough's bequest to, 213, 214. 

'Marchmont Papers' quoted, 143, 155, 
166, 205, 214, 219. 

Maria Theresa, the War of Austrian 
Succession, 185-189, 191, 193, 195- 
197, 203, 220, 221, 225, 226, 260, 
361, 367; her character, 197. 

Marlborough, Duke of, 121, 156, 313, 
334, 434- 



Marlborough, Sarah, Duchess of, death 
and bequests of, 19, 213, 214. 

' Marlborough, Duchess of, Life of,' see 
Thomson. 

Marriage Act, 277. 

Marseilles, 42, 64, 65. 

Martin's ' Histoire de France,' 192. 

Martin, Mr., 326. 

Martyn, Mr., 43. 

Mayo, Mr., 36. 

Mediterranean, English fleet in, 189. 

Medmenham, Brotherhood of, 248. 

Meehan's ' Famous Houses at Bath ' 
quoted, 276. 

Meredith, Sir William, 393. 

Middlesex, Lord, M.P. for Old Sarum, 
247. 

Milan, 191. 

Miller, Mr. Saunderson, 280. 

'Ministry, The New,' a collection of 
songs, etc., 128. 

Minorca, 192, 268; fall of, 410-41 1. 

Mirabeau's power of oratory, 456. 

Mirepoix, Duchess of, 100. 

Mirepoix, Duke of, 365. 

Mohawks, 21. 

Mohun, sells Boconnoc, 5, 6. 

Molinox, Mr., 57. 

Molwitz, Austrians defeated at, 187. 

Monmouth, Duke of, at Sedgemoor,i72. 

Mons, capture of, 194, 195. 

Montagu, Duke of, 390. 

Montagu, Mrs. Elizabeth, 48, 49 ; ' Let- 
ters ' quoted, 277, 278, 282, 322. 

Montcalm, General, 416; 'Montcalm 
and Wolfe,' see Parkman. 

Montespan, 177. 

Montpelier, 42, 65. 

Morayshire, 7. 

' Moreau, Souvenirs de,' referred to, 364, 
365. 

Mudge, Mr., 456. 

Mug, Matthew, 272. 

Murray, William, Earl of, formerly 
Lord Mansfield, oratorical powers, 
275; precision of, 452; eminence of, 
310; Solicitor-General, 204, 289; At- 
torney-General, 413,414; his chance 
of promotion, 308; re new Cabinet, 
347; changes in the Cabinet, 355; re 
Jacobites, 358; re subsidy treaties, 
393-395, 398; attitude towards Pitt, 
245, 384; Pitt's attack on, 328, 329, 
331-333 ; on Pitt's powers of ridicule, 
457; enemy of Fox, 351; coolness 
towards Newcastle, 392; corre- 
spondence regarding, 49, 305, 306. 

Mutiny Bill, 253. 



475 



LORD CHATHAM 



Namur, capture of, 195. 

Naples, 180, 189. 

Napoleon I., 126, 197, 246. 

Napoleon III., 463. 

Navy, proposed reduction of the, 263, 
264. 

Necessity Fort, surrender of, 319. 

Nedham, Mrs. Catherine, see Pitt, 
Catherine. 

Nedham, Robert, his marriage with 
Catherine Pitt, 44, 45; nominated 
for Old Sarum, 119. 

Nevers, 90. 

Newbury, 43, 68. 

Newcastle, Sir Thomas Pelham, after- 
wards Duke of, his character, 127, 
159-161; an incident at his uncle's 
death, 127; refuses a pension, 160; 
contempt of George II. for, 138, 181, 
224; supports Henry Pelham, 198, 
199; blunder in the Lords, 208; sup- 
ports the Dutch cause, 225, 226; the 
ministerial crisis of 1746, 227, 228, 
230; the Seaford election, 247; his 
jealous nature, 255; his dislike for 
Bedford, 255; views on the Han- 
overian question, 261; Pitt's enmity 
with, 385, 390, 413, 429, 438, 442; 
profession of gratitude to Pitt, 265; 
Fox's vengeance on, 270; his jeal- 
ousy of Fox, 400; Fox's hatred of, 
439; the Jews' Naturalisation Act, 
272,277-279; letters and correspond- 
ence, 89, 128, 256, 285, 287, 299- 
3°3> 3 l6 > 320, 352, 420-421; Secre- 
tary of State, 291, 292, 294; his ap- 
pointments, 310; words with Chat- 
ham, 325 ; his power in the Commons, 
330, 354, 355 ; negotiations with Fox, 
335; Prime Minister, 354; formation 
of Cabinet, 355 ; councils of war, 362 ; 
and Hanoverian treaties, 373; at- 
tempted negotiations between New- 
castle and French Ambassador, 365; 
loyalty of Commons to, 374; Pitt's 
suspicions of, 375; attempted recon- 
ciliation between Newcastle and 
Bedford, 376; his opinion of Lyttel- 
ton, 376; political unrest, 392, 402, 
412-415, 417-428; re execution of 
Byng, 411, 412; deserted by his 
friends, 429-432; resignation, 442. 

'Newcastle MSS.,' 287, 288, 299, 318, 
3 2 °> 342, 432, 442. 

Newdigate, Sir Roger, 331. 

Newton, Bishop, ' Works ' referred to, 
162; metaphor of, 449. 

Niesse ceded to Frederick II., 189. 



Nivernois, M. de, in. 

Noailles, 365. 

Norfolk, election expenses in, 132. 

Norfolk House, 149. 

North, Lord, 242. 

Northampton, 40, 56, 59, 60, 213. 

Nugent, Robert, Earl, 129, 248, 251, 

331. 
Nuthall, Thomas, 284. 

Okehampton, 4, 68. 
Oliver, Dr., 97, 104. 
Onslow, Rt. Hon. Arthur, Chatham's 

appeal to, 327. 
Orange, House of, returned to power, 

*95- 
Orford's ' George III.,' see Walpole, 

Horace. 
Orleans, Regent of, 3. 
Orsini, 463. 

Orwell, portrait at, 321, 322. 
Oswald, James, 266. 
Oswego, fall of, 416. 
Oudenarde, Battle of, George II. at, 

n 179- 

Oxford, 9, 28, 49, no, 331. 

Pall Mall, 5, 24, 33. 

Pan, Temple of, 281. 

Paris, 42, 62, 100, 167. 

Parkman's 'Montcalm and Wolfe' 
quoted, 361, 364, 416. 

Parliamentary History, see Cobbett, 
William. 

Parma, proposed reconquest, 191. 

Paulett, Lord, 103. 

Peel, Sir Robert, 159, 205, 445, 446; a 
comparison, 2 1 0-2 1 2 . 

Pelham, Colonel, 278. 

Pelham, Rt. Hon. Henry, effect of his 
death, 88, 89, 274, 285-287,460; the 
King's regard for, 181, 229, 285; eager 
for peace, 195 ; becomes Premier, 198, 
199, 286; Chatham's support, 208, 
265, 359; Carteret's support, 208, 
265, 359; Carteret's dismissal, 215, 
223; assistance to the Dutch, 225; 
refuses office perquisites, 234-236, 
246, 286; on Aix-la-Chapelle Treaty, 
253; eulogy of Chatham, 254, 287; 
seeks retirement, 258; foreign policy, 
263, 407; 'Memoirs of Henry Pel- 
ham,' see Coxe, William. 

Pelham, Sir Thomas, see Newcastle, 
Duke of. 

Pembroke, Lord, 1st Dragoon Guards, 
40, 70. 

Penshurst, Chatham visits, 277. 



476 



INDEX 



Peter the Great, 136, 190. 

Philip, Don, designs on Milan, 191. 

Phillimore, R. J., 'Memoirs and Corre- 
spondence of Lyttelton ' referred to, 
128, 279, 295, 296, 308. 

Phillips, Mrs., 52, 58. 

Phillipson, Mr., 434. 

Pitt, Dr., 108. 

Pitt, Ann (sister to Lord Chatham), 
friendships, 38, 45, 48, 49; State 
appointments, 49, 79; nicknames, 
50; correspondence with her brother, 
50-77, 81-115, 448; quarrels with 
Chatham, 76, 78-80, 105, 234; re- 
tires to France, 84, 87; returns to 
England, 94, 95; health and mental 
condition, 98, 106, 107, in; income 
increased to, in; resides at Ken- 
sington, 115; grief at death of brother, 
116, 1 1 7 ; under restraint, death, 116. 

Pitt, Betty (sister to Lord Chatham), 
history and description of, 45-48. 

Pitt, Catherine (sister to Lord Chat- 
ham), afterwards - Nedham, 44, 45, 
77, 88-90. 

Pitt, Clara Villiers, see Pitt, Betty. 

Pitt, Elizabeth, see Pitt, Betty. 

Pitt, Essex (daughter of Governor 
Pitt), marriage, death, 11, 13, 88. 

Pitt, George (of Strathfieldsaye) , 24. 

Pitt, Harriot, wife of Robert Pitt, see 
Villiers. 

Pitt, Harriot (sister of Lord Chatham), 
matrimonial designs on, 38, 39, 41; 
her character, 44; marriage of, 44; 
illness, 64, 68. 

Pitt, Hester, wife of Chatham, see 
Grenville. 

Pitt, John (great-grandfather of Chat- 
ham) , Vicar of Blandf ord, 1 . 

Pitt, John (son of Governor Pitt), dis- 
position, 6, 12, 13. 

Pitt, John, a Dorsetshire kinsman, 278, 
298. 

Pitt, John (eldest son of Lord Chat- 
ham), 415, 434. 

Pitt, Lucy (daughter of Governor Pitt), 
marriage, death, 11-13. 

Pitt, Mary (sister of Lord Chatham), re- 

• ferred to, 87, 93, 95, 97, 98, 101, 104, 
105; described, 45, 48; letter to 
Lady Suffolk, 94. 

Pitt, Robert (son of Governor Pitt, 
father of Lord Chatham), family 
relationships, 8, 11, 13-15, 24; 
character, 11, 13; death, 5, 14, 18, 
36; correspondence from son's tutor, 
26, 29. 



Pitt, Thomas ('The Governor'), par- 
entage, characteristics, 1-5, 6, 7, 13, 
22, 23, 462; prescience regarding 
Chatham, 10, 11, 24; mourning item, 

Pitt, Thomas (son of Robert, brother 
of Lord Chatham), conduct and 
characteristics, 13-15; seeks ap- 
pointment, 16, 17; marriage, 38; 
charge against, 45; parliamentary 
career, 119, 147, 247. 

Pitt, Thomas (son of Thomas Pitt), 1st 
Baron Camelford, letters quoted and 
referred to, 1,3,4-7, 11, 12, 14, 16,41, 
44, 46, 48, 49. 7 8 ~ 8 °. 84-86, 93, 95, 
102, 105, 107, in, 116, 120, 147, 377, 
447, 451; created Baron Camelford, 
18; on Chatham's marriage, 322; 
bias toward Chatham, 21, 46, 94, 
117, 235. 

Pitt, Villiers Clara, see Pitt, Betty. 

Pitt, William, 1st Earl of Chatham, see 
Chatham. 

Pitt, William (the younger) , birth, 102; 
death, 321. 

Place Bill, extension of, 224. 

Plutarch, referred to, 403. 

Poetical quotations, 18, 57, 136, 160, 
164, 194, 232, 272, 279. 

Poland, partition of, 197. 

Poland, King of, Berlin Treaty and the, 
189. 

Poland- Saxony, claims of Austria on, 
187. 

Polwarth against Walpole, 136. 

Pomfret, Lord, 425. 

Pompadour, Madame de, 365. 

Pope, Alexander, quoted, 72, 121, 122, 
181. 

Porritt's ' Unreformed House of Com- 
mons ' referred to, 119. 

Porte, Mr. de la, 94. 

Porter's ' History of the Knights of 
Malta' quoted, 411. 

Portsmouth, Duchess of, intercedes for 
Governor Pitt, 3. 

Potter, Thomas, supports petition 
against Seaford, 247; Bucks Assize 
dispute, 248-251; Chatham's praise 
of, 414; position found for, 439, 442 ; 
opposes navy reduction, 264. 

Pragmatic Sanction, maintenance of, 
186, 188. 

Prague, King of Bohemia proclaimed 
in, 188. 

Pratt, Charles, 1st Earl Camden, 25, 
283. 

Preston, Mr., 45. 



477 



LORD CHATHAM 



'Pretyman Papers,' 323. 

Prevot as a prototype, 402. 

Prior Park, 103. 

Protestant Succession, endurance to 
secure, 182, 183 

Prussia, Convention signed at Han- 
over, 193. 

Pulteney, Sir William, Earl of Bath, 
Ann Pitt's designs on, 49, 50, 98; 
entertained at Stowe, his wit ,122,232; 
idolised by the people, 162, 239; 
Walpole's use of, 162, 200, 460; 
stands aside for Carteret, 165; popu- 
larity declines, 169, 237; nettled at 
criticism, 170; claims head of Gov- 
ernment, 198; forms a Government — 
its failure, 228, 229, 230, 373; pro- 
scribed, 230; lack of character, 236; 
introduces Prize Bill, 385; New- 
castle's reflection on, 430. 

QUEENSBERRY, DucheSS of, 49, 77. 

Queensberry, Duke of, 228. 

Radway, 279. 

Ranby, Dr., 209. 

Raumer's ' Frederick II. and his Times,' 

367- 

Reading, 40, 328. 

Redhall, 7. 

'Rejected Addresses,' see Smith, 
Horatio. 

Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 21, 445. 

Rhine, River, 190. 

Richelieu, Duke of, 188, 389, 427. 

Richmond, 135, 178. 

Richmond, Duke of, 269. 

Ridgeway, Earl of Londonderry, 11. 

Rigby, Richard, 387. 

Rivers, Lord, 1. 

Robinson, Sir Thomas, his appoint- 
ments, 3 14, 3 15 ; Master of the Ward- 
robe and Secretary of State, 301, 
3*4, 3 I S» 3 l8 > 425, 439; pensioned, 
357. 358, 400; Chatham's remarks 
to, 329; Newcastle's praise of, 314; 
panegyric on himself, 391. 

Rochester, 95. 

Rogers, Samuel, ' Recollections of Sam- 
uel Rogers' referred to, 78; 'Table 
Talk,' 332. 

Rolt, Bayntun, 159. 

Rolliad, quotation from, 18. 

Rondet, the royal jeweller, 4. 

Ross, Man of, 276. 

Roucoux, French victory at, 195. 

Royston, Lord, 423. 

Russell, Lord John, 212. 



Russia, George III.'s treaty with, 339, 

346. 
Ryder, Sir Dudley, 413, 414. 

Sackville, Lord George, 391, 403. 
St. James's Square, 96, 97, 100, 101, 

103, 108, 109, 140, 149. 
St. Lawrence River, naval battle at 

mouth of, 364. 
St. Rumbald, spring at, 277. 
Salisbury, 119. 
Salisbury, Lord, 2. 
Samson of Battersea, nickname of 

Bolingbroke, 299. 
Sancho Panza, 176. 
Sandwich, Earl of, 255, 257. 
Sandys, Baron, 136. 
Sardinia, 187, 191; King of , 206, 236. 
Sarpedon, 167. 
Sarum, Old, 2, 4, 5, 119, 245. 
Saunders, Sir Charles, 410. 
Savile, Sir George, 175. 
Savoy, House of, 191. 
Saxe, Marshal, marches against Austria, 

192; successes in the Low Countries, 

194. 
Saxons, as allies of Britain, 194. 
Saxony, entered by Frederick II., 193; 

Elector of, 189, 261, 263. 
Schwerin, Marshal, defeats Austrians at 

Molwitz, 187. 
Scrope, John, 172. 
Seaford, election of Chatham for, 247, 

327- 

Sedgemoor, 172. 

Seine, River, 183. 

Selwyn, George, 100, 315, 356. 

Seward's 'Anecdotes' referred to, 50, 
149, 159, 166, 456. 

Shelburne, Lord, thoughts on Thomas 
Pitt, 17 ; on the madness of the Pitts, 
23; on Pitt's use of words, 456; on 
Richard Temple, 121; troop offered 
to, 148; on Pulteney's oratory, 162; 
'Life of Shelburne,' see Fitzmaurice, 
Lord. 

Shenstone, William, 279. 

Sheridan, R. B., 457. 

Shippen, William, 136. 

Siddons, Mrs., 455. 

Sidmouth, Lord, 445. 

Silesia, 192. 

Sinclair, Sir John, 7. 

Sion, 105, 106. 

'Skew,' a nickname, 53, 63. 

Smith, Horatio, 'Rejected Addresses' 
referred to, 22. 

Smollett, Tobias, 161. 



478 



INDEX 



Soho, 5. 

Solomon, name given to Chatham, 325. 

South Lodge, 280, 281. 

South Sea Bubble, 5. 

Spain, extravagance of the Bourbons, 
180; claim on Austria, 187; cause of 
war with, 196; Walpole's policy, 133, 
134, 151, 152, 154; war declared 
against, 185; 'Britons in Spanish 
prisons' cry, 154; peace question 
raised by Lord Egmont, 259. 

Spencer, Lady Diana, 139. 

Spencer, John, bequests to and from, 
214. 

Sporus, 181. 

Stair, Lord, 191, 200. 

Stanhope, George, death of, 90. 

Stanhope, Lady Hester, 7, 128, 445; 
'Memoirs,' 128. 

Stanhope, James, 1st Earl, 28; soldier 
and statesman, 5, 43; marriage with 
Lucy Pitt, 13. 

Stanhope, Philip Dormer, see Chester- 
field, Earl of. 

Stanhope, Sir William, speech on the 
Bucks Assize dispute, 248-251. 

Stanislas, 66. 

Stanley, Hans, 297. 

Stannaries, Thomas Pitt, Warden of, 

States General, a party to the Treaty 
of Berlin, 189. 

Stephen, Leslie, 'English Literature 
and Society in the Eighteenth Cen- 
tury,' 196, 279, 321. 

Stewart, General, 24. 

Stockwell, I., as tutor to Lord Chat- 
ham, 28, 29. 

Stone, Andrew, 351, 356, 419. 

Stone House, 277. 

Stormont, 413. 

Stowe, 71-77, 120, 122, 248, 266, 278, 
321, 324. 

Strange, Lord, 253. 

Stratford, 5, 26. 

Stuart, Charles Edward, ' the Young 
Pretender,' 183, 193, 194, 204, 207, 
222. 

Stuart, House of, 133. 

Stuart, Mrs., 88. 

'Sublimity Pitt,' 50. 

Subsidies, On, 189, 192, 263, 346, 347, 
392-396, 397. 

Suffolk, 213. 

Suffolk, Lady, letters referred to, n, 
49, 52, 70-74, 79, 94-96, 99, 117, 149. 

Sunnmghill, 277. 

Sura j ah Dowlah, 416. 



Sussex, tour in, 277. 
Swallowfield, 5, 10, 11, 40, 52. 
Sweden, King of, 192. 

Talbot, Lord, evil living of, 45. 

Taylor, Miss, 46. 

Temperley's 'Essay on the Causes of 
War with Spain' referred to, 153. 

Temple, Countess, see Grenville, Lady. 

Temple, Lord, see Grenville, Richard. 

Temple, afterwards Earl Grenville. 

Temple, Sir Richard, Viscount Cob- 
ham, 16, 71, 74, 216, 224, 266, 277, 
316, 459; builder of palace of Stowe, 
120, 121; his entertainments at, 121, 
122 ; served under Marlborough, 121 ; 
called 'the brave Cobham,' 121; his 
great riches, 124, 129, 130; various 
titles and honours conferred on, 121; 
opposed to the Excise Bill, 122; 
sides with Pitt, 20; Pitt devoted to 
Cobham, 148, 164; quarrel with Pitt, 
234; on the war in Flanders, 204, 
205; growing jealousy of his 'young 
patriots,' 249; nicknames to, 120; 
death of, 122, 127. 

Temple Bar, 156. 

Thackeray, Francis, 'Life of Chatham' 
referred to, 26, 49, 150. 

Thackeray, W. M., referred to, 12; 
satire on George II. mentioned, 
180. 

Thames, Dutch ships in the, 207. 

'The Test,' a newspaper, 46. 

Thessaly, 303. 

Thirsk, 4. 

Thomson's 'Life of the Duchess of 
Marlborough,' 213. 

Timbs, 'Anecdote Biography,' 280. 

Tom Jones, see Fielding, Henry. 

Torrens, W. T. McC, 'History of Cabi- 
nets,' 252. 

Towcester, 73. 

Townshend, Lady, 325. 

Townshend, Charles, 391, 396, 402, 

425, 432. 
Townshend, Colonel, 253. 
Townshend, George, 391, 402, 425. 
Trinity College, Chatham admitted 

to, 28. 
Trojans, 303. 
Tunbridge, 279. 

Tunbridge Wells, 277, 282, 285. 
Twickenham, 5, 115. 

Underwood's ' Historical MSS.' quoted, 

235. 
Utrecht, 17, 20, 36, 37, 40. 



479 



LORD CHATHAM 



Vale Royal, 13. 

Valliere, La, 177. 

Vauxhall, New, 277. 

Vere, Lady, 98. 

Vere, Lord, 98. 

Versailles, 100; Palace at, 177; replica 
of, in a Bavarian lake, 177; Treaty 
of, 366. 

Very, Count, 100. 

Vesey, Mr., 36. 

Vienna threatened by the French army, 
188. 

Villiers, George, Duke of Buckingham, 
24. 

Villiers, Harriot, marriage with Rob- 
ert Pitt, 11, 24; mother of Lord 
Chatham, 11; her family, 14; returns 
to France, 14; correspondence with 
her son, 36-43 ; death of, 44. 

Villiers, Lord, 36-39. 

Voiture, 55. 

Voltaire's 'Candide' referred to, 411. 

Waddington, Richard, 'Louis XV. 
et le Renversement des Alliances' 
referred to, 366. 

Waldegrave, Lady Betty, 99, 100. 

Waldegrave, James, Earl, procures Pitt 
letters of introduction at Paris, 64; 
on the character of George II., 179; 
on Sir Thomas Robinson, 315; ne- 
gotiates for Fox to enter the Cabinet, 
3 3 4 - 3 36; ' Correspondence ' referred 
to, 327, 328, 332. 

Waldegrave, John, Earl, 100. 

Waller, 205, 216; appointed Cofferer, 
217. 

Walpole, Horace, 2nd Earl of Orford 
(son of Sir Robert Walpole) , 258, 376. 

Walpole, Horace, 4th Earl of Orford 
(brother of Sir Robert Walpole), his 
kinship with Lord Hervey, 181 ; affec- 
tion for Lord Camelford, 18; as a 
gossip, 321; on Thomas Pitt, 17; 
charge against Betty Pitt, 45 ; re Ann 
Pitt, 48, 49, 84, 107, 115-117; on 
Pitt's behaviour to his sisters, 45; 
on the Grenvilles, 123, 126, 128, 129; 
on George II., 178; on Pitt's speeches, 
358, 360, 369, 384, 387, 393, 396-397, 
400, 402 ; his admiration for Pitt, 311, 
449, 457; on Pitt's impatience for 
office, 223; on Pitt's change of opin- 
ion, 263; on Pitt's sullen illness, 271; 
on Dr. Lee's attack on Pitt, 233, 245 ; 
on Pitt's resentment against the 
Newcastles, 273, 325; his partiality 
for Fox, 335; on Sir Thomas Robin- 



son's appointment, 314; on Lyttel- 
ton, 377; on Lord Wilmington, 165; 
opposes Saxon subsidy, 263 ; on the 
Bath Ministry, 229; on the loss of 
Minorca, 412, 417; on the American 
war; on the scheme of the Notables, 
437-438; letter to Bentley, 313. 

Walpole, Horace, 'Memoirs of the 
Reign of George III.,' quotations 
from, 84, 128, 245, 326, 334, 33s, 
337, 342, 360, 420, 425, 427, 435- 
438. 

Walpole, Sir Robert, 1st Earl of Orford, 
character of, 122, 132, 134, 135, 232; 
his love for sport, 135; his relations 
with George II., 180, 181, 200, 201; 
on the political character of George 
II., 179; his relations with Pitt, 68, 
146-148, 157, 164, 171, 172; his atti- 
tude towards the Prince of Wales, 
140, 145; his attitude towards New- 
castle, 161 -163; supports Pelham, 
286-287; his policy regarding Spain, 
133. *34, 154, iS 6 , 185; on the 
Army, 151; on the Secessions, 155; 
supports Maria Theresa, 187 ; favours 
the Hanoverian vote, 206; speech on 
threatened landing of the Pretender, 
208; temporary resignation of, 165; 
inquiry into administration of, 170; 
punishment of, 168; succeeded by 
Lord Carteret, 188; fall of, 136, 137, 
157-159, 164, 460; resignation of, 
and papers burnt by his brother 
Horace, 158; impeachment of, 430; 
illness and death of, 209, 210; com- 
pared with Pitt and Peel, 210-212; 
'Memoirs of Sir Robert Walpole,' 
see Coxe, William. 

Walpole, Thomas, purchases Hayes, 
282. 

Washington, George, General, 319, 362. 

Webster, Sir Whistler, 278. 

West, Gilbert, 277, 280, 282, 448; his 
house at Wickham, 325. 

West, Molly, 321. 

Westminster, Treaty of, 366. 

Westminster School, 328. 

Westphalia, 279; Treaty of, 261. 

Whately, Mr., 'Observations on Mod- 
ern Gardening,' 281. 

Wickham, Chatham's honeymoon spent 
at, 325. 

Wilberforce, William, 239. 

Wilhelmine, Princess of Prussia, after- 
wards Margravine of Bareith, 139. 

Wilkes, John, 126, 327, 328, 447. 

Wilkins' 'Political Ballads,' 272. 



480 



INDEX 



William III., indifference to England, 

183; Pitt's story of his coming, 252. 
Williams, Sir Charles Hanbury, 160; 

lampoon on Pitt, 215; 'Works of,' 

quoted, 194, 215, 424. 
Wilmington, Lord, 165, 198, 286, 459. 
Wilton, Joseph, 490. 
Wiltshire, lands purchased in, 5. 
Wimbledon, Duchess of Marlborough's 

estate at, 214. 
Windsor, 144. 
' Wingfield MSS.' quoted, 313, 32 ,431, 

442. 
Winnington, Thomas, 229, 232. 
Wood, Robert, ' Essay on the Original 

Genius of Homer' quoted, 168. 
Worms, Treaty of, 191, 206. 
Wotton, residence of George Grenville, 

10 3» 321. 3 22 - 



Wyndham, Baron, 136, 232. 
Wynn, Sir Watkin, 205. 

Yarmouth, Lady, 256, 354, 438; and 
George II., 178, 339, 423; mistress of 
George II., 424; and Pitt, 99-101, 
240, 423, 429; Fox solicits her in- 
fluence to obtain a peerage, 270; and 
Fox's overtures with the King, 311; 
her utterance regarding, 420. 

Yonge, Lady, 219. 

Yorke, Charles, 339, 340; interview 
with Chatham, 341. 

Yorke, Joseph, 170. 

Yorke, Philip, see Hardwicke, Earl of. 

Zoroastrians, politicians compared 
with, 355. 



THE END 



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